2021 march madness

While watching March Madness this year, I felt there seemed to be a ton of upsets. So I used a 1985-2016 NCAA March Madness dataset and filled in data from the 2017-2021 tournaments. I subsetted these data to just the first and second rounds (rounds of 64 & 32).

I examined the difference between winning and losing teams rankings - overall, and subsetted for upsets. The dataset indicates that across all games, the average win-loss seed difference was lower than historical averages. When restricted to upsets, the first and second rounds of the 2021 tournament showed a higher number of upsets and seed difference between winning and losing teams in upsets. This indicates that the 2021 tournament did have more ‘big’ upsets than historical averages. Download here.