GREENSBORO, N.C. — As advanced statistical analysis and its attendant new technology continue to reshape how sports are understood, watched and even played — when to punt on fourth down in football, where to position a baseball team’s infielders and how to build a winning basketball team — these new numbers also create a vexing problem:

How to account for what complex algorithms cannot explain.

The thirst for information is such that one essential set of college basketball data that will help determine the field for this month’s N.C.A.A. tournament, Ken Pomeroy’s eponymous KenPom ratings, includes a metric to shed light on when things do not actually go by the numbers.

Pomeroy has a rather analog term for it: luck.

“Luck is basically performance in close games,” Pomeroy said. “People generally don’t like the term ‘luck’ — that’s the feedback I get. Technically, I’d call it ‘randomness’ or something a lot more wordy, but that doesn’t fit well above a column.”

In short, KenPom’s luck factor considers the difference between a team’s record and what the data would expect it to be. If a team’s record is better than its predictive numbers, it is lucky. If it is worse, then it is unlucky.

This season, according to the KenPom ratings, no team among the 353 Division I college men’s basketball programs has been luckier than the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.