Was 2018 the Craziest NCAA Tournament Ever?

Measuring the 'Madness' of every March

Posted by Sean Abu on April 4, 2018

Listening to sports talk radio or talking to your coworker on Slack, it might seem as if this year’s tournament was the craziest ever. There was the first ever #16 seed to upset a #1 seed. Loyola-Chicago became the fourth #11 seed to make it to the Final Four, and Kansas State and Florida State both made it to Elite Eight as #9 seeds. With all of that madness on one side of the bracket, the other side has been much tamer with two #1 seeds making it to the Final Four. So how much Madness was there this March? How does it compare to 2011 when 8th-seeded Butler made it to the championship game and VCU made it to the Final Four as a #11 seed? Was it crazier than 1985 when Villanova won the championship as a #8 seed?

The short answer is I have 2018 ranked third behind, behind 2014 and 2013.

Upset Score by Year

When looking to answer this question, I was unable to find any measure that fully judges the “Madness” of each tournament. Some articles compare the average seeding of the Final Four participants, but this is an incomplete answer because it doesn’t take into account all of the chaos that can happen throughout the tournament. There are years like 1995 which had a lot of first round upsets, but by the later rounds, the higher seeded teams restored order and the eventual champion was #1-seeded UCLA. Other years are like 2000 where the first round produced fewer upsets, but you ended up with two #8 seeds in the Final Four with Wisconsin and North Carolina. To address this, I created an “upset score” that takes into account all aspects of the “Madness”: large individual game upsets (UVA & UMBC), Cinderella runs (Loyola Chicago), and the overall number of upsets in the tournament.

I create this measure by quantifying the difference between the final bracket results and the expected bracket at the beginning of the tournament. I define the “expected bracket” as one that goes “chalk” – where the higher seed wins every game – ending with only #1 seeds in the Final Four.

The upset score for a tournament is calculated per game basis and then added up over the entire tournament. For each game a score is assessed by subtracting the seed of the actual winner of that game from that of the expected winner. So when a #1 seed beats a #16 seed, that game earns 0 points because the #1 seed was the expected winner. However, when #16-seeded UMBC’s Golden Retrievers beat #1 seed UVA, that game earned a score of 15. In the second round, when #9-seeded Kansas St. beat UMBC, that game earned a score of 8. This is the difference in seeding between Kansas St. and the expected winner, #1-seeded UVA. Yes, Kansas State was the favorite heading into their matchup against UMBC, but that was not the expected matchup. At the beginning of the tournament #1 UVA, not Kansas State, was expected to be in the Sweet Sixteen.

This scoring format takes into consideration the likelihood of each upset, according to seeding, as well as deep runs by Cinderella teams. A tournament that goes ‘chalk’ would earn an upset score of 0. While the opposite, a tournament where the lower seed wins every game, would have a score of 655. The average upset score of the tournaments over the last 34 years has been 96 points.

Season Champion RunnerUp 1 2 3 4 5 6 Total Cinderella Unexpected Winners
1985 Villanova Georgetown 33 38 8 8 7 7 101 Villanova 20
1986 Louisville Duke 38 49 25 11 1 1 125 LSU 23
1987 Indiana Syracuse 45 28 12 6 1 0 92 LSU 22
1988 Kansas Oklahoma 29 30 11 6 5 5 86 Kansas 19
1989 Michigan Seton Hall 54 10 9 5 4 2 84 Minnesota 25
1990 UNLV Duke 35 48 28 8 2 0 121 Loy Marymount 26
1991 Duke Kansas 57 24 13 3 3 1 101 Temple 21
1992 Duke Michigan 36 27 11 9 5 0 88 Michigan 20
1993 North Carolina Michigan 36 25 6 1 0 0 68 G Washington 15
1994 Arkansas Duke 29 28 10 4 1 0 72 Boston College 21
1995 UCLA Arkansas 48 11 6 5 1 0 71 Old Dominion 19
1996 Kentucky Syracuse 37 19 7 7 3 0 73 Arkansas 18
1997 Arizona Kentucky 39 37 15 3 3 3 100 Chattanooga 20
1998 Kentucky Utah 47 36 9 5 3 1 101 Valparaiso 24
1999 Connecticut Duke 50 48 17 3 0 0 118 Gonzaga 26
2000 Michigan St Florida 11 45 28 18 4 0 106 North Carolina 22
2001 Duke Arizona 65 33 14 3 1 0 116 Temple 25
2002 Maryland Indiana 43 35 23 5 4 0 110 Missouri 19
2003 Syracuse Kansas 30 27 7 5 3 2 74 Butler 24
2004 Connecticut Georgia Tech 18 33 16 4 3 1 75 Alabama 21
2005 North Carolina Illinois 38 32 17 7 0 0 94 WI Milwaukee 23
2006 Florida UCLA 51 31 13 16 3 2 116 George Mason 25
2007 Florida Ohio St 13 11 1 2 0 0 27 UNLV 13
2008 Kansas Memphis 42 30 10 0 0 0 82 Davidson 16
2009 North Carolina Michigan St 46 9 2 3 1 0 61 Arizona 17
2010 Duke Butler 48 40 13 9 4 0 114 Cornell 26
2011 Connecticut Butler 35 40 24 22 9 2 132 VA Commonwealth 25
2012 Kentucky Kansas 66 33 9 5 1 0 114 Ohio 22
2013 Louisville Michigan 64 41 16 14 3 0 138 FL Gulf Coast 24
2014 Connecticut Kentucky 46 39 24 14 13 6 142 Connecticut 24
2015 Duke Wisconsin 35 30 9 6 0 0 80 Michigan St 16
2016 Villanova North Carolina 71 26 12 11 1 1 122 Syracuse 26
2017 North Carolina Gonzaga 26 25 18 8 0 0 77 Xavier 16
2018 Villanova Michigan 49 45 27 12 2 0 135 Loyola-Chicago 26

In 2014, the tournament started off normal with a first round score of 46 points, about 5 more than the average. But as the 8th-seeded Kentucky Wildcats and the 7th-seeded UConn Huskies marched towards the finals – the largest average seed of any championship game – that year’s score rose to the top. The second “maddest” tournament, in 2013, unfolded in a completely different manner. The underdogs that year racked up 105 points through the first two rounds – the most ever – but the #1 seeded Louisville Cardinals won the championship that year, preventing it from being the craziest ever.

The least chaotic tournament ever was 2007 when #1 Florida beat fellow #1 seed Ohio State, and the total upset score was 27. There were only 13 games in which a the winning seed was not the expected winner, and eight of these “upsets” were by teams ranked only one seed lower than their opponent. The biggest Cinderella that year was #7-seed UNLV, who made only it to the Sweet Sixteen. 30 other tournaments had a higher upset score in just the first round than 2007 had for the entire tournament. The next least chaotic year was 1995, which had a upset score that was 2.5 times higher than 2007.

Looking at the heatmap below you can see how tournaments developed through the rounds. The darker red square show rounds where there was a higher upset score compared to the same round for all other years. Conversely, the darker blue squares highlight rounds where the upset score is lower compared to the same round for all other years.

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Who has been the biggest Cinderella of all time? That title remains with the 1985 Villanova Wildcats. As the lowest seed (#8) to ever win a championship, their tournament run earned a score of 35, which beats out the four #11 seeds (1985 LSU, 2006 George Mason, 2011 VCU, and 2018 Loyola-Chicago) who scored 32 by making it to the Final Four.

Biggest Cinderella Teams

Season Cinderella Upset Score
1985 Villanova 35
1986 LSU 32
2011 VA Commonwealth 32
2006 George Mason 32
2018 Loyola-Chicago 32
2016 Syracuse 28
2014 Connecticut 28
2002 Missouri 26
2013 FL Gulf Coast 26

It is easy to look at the upset scores over the past decade and believe there is an upward trend. Some might use these recent scores as evidence that there is more parity in college basketball or argue that the committee is incorrectly seeding the teams to create more madness. Looking at the trendline of the scores ever since the tournament expanded to 64 teams, we see this could be more of a cyclical ebb and flow and not overall change in the college basketball landscape. While this score has no predictive power for future tournaments, it does help give some context around all previous tournaments. So when your co-worker makes some hyperbolic statement about this being the crazy tournament ever, you can tell them, “Well actually…”

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Future Explorations:

Some might argue that a ‘chalk’ bracket is not the ‘expected’ bracket and every year there are teams that the public and Vegas pick to outperform their seeding. (How did your pick for Arizona in the Final Four work out this year?) It is possible I could include Vegas odds for each team winning the Championship as a way of defining or weighing an upset. This would require a monumental effort to find and aggregate all of that data. Another option would be to use some sort of rating like RPI, to help determine the “expected bracket” and to weight each upset.

Initially, I looked at using the results of ESPN’s Tournament Challenge as a way of evaluating each year. For every year I could take the score of the millions of brackets submitted and calculate the average score for that year and then be able to compare the madness of each year by looking at this score. For example, if one year the average score of all the brackets was 700 points and the next year it was 800 points, we could assume the latter tournament was more predictable because participants were better able to predict the results. An added benefit of this measure is that it would take into consideration how likely the public though certain teams were to be upset. For example, in a year when people think a particular #1 seed is weak and a lot of brackets correctly foreshadow their upset, the average score of all the brackets would be higher than a year when a completely unexpected #1 seed is upset. This method, however, would limit the years of historical comparison to the last 21 years that ESPN has hosted the tournament. Also, as the popularity of the contest and the cash prizes given for winning it increase, more people are filling out brackets and possibly changing their selection strategy in order to create a more unique bracket. These changes in the data sample make it difficult to compare across the years.