National Collegiate Athletic Association Tournament Research Articles

Engineering: A Long Hard Road-Worth the Effort

In 1983, there was a basketball coach at North Carolina State University who believed in his team despite the odds against it. His team was not expected to compete well that year but had surprised opponent after opponent. When his team was invited to the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament that year, it was not expected to advance beyond the first or second round. In pursuit of a national title, the coach cont inued to instill that you can attitude in his players. To everyone's surprise, perhaps even to the coach, the team won the national championship. The coach's belief was fully supported.

Relative Age Effect in Collegiate Soccer: Influence of Nationality, Playing Position, and Class.

Hurley, E, Comstock, BA, Haile, L, and Beyer, KS. Relative age effect in collegiate soccer: influence of nationality, playing position, and class. J Strength Cond Res 33(12): 3295-3301, 2019-The purpose of this study was to evaluate the existence of relative age effects (RAEs) in collegiate soccer. In addition, the impact of nationality, position, class, and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament qualification status on the prevalence of RAEs was assessed. Birth dates from male NCAA Division I soccer athletes (n = 4,082) from the 2017/2018 season were categorized into quarters based on calendar and scholastic quarters. All athlete birth-date distributions were compared with the expected birth-date distributions for the United States. International-born athletes (INT) displayed a significant difference in birth-date distribution when assessed with calendar quarters, whereas American-born athletes (USA) showed a significant difference in birth-date distributions when assessed with scholastic quarters. Furthermore, INT showed significant RAEs for midfielders and defenders, whereas USA showed significant RAEs midfielders and goalkeepers. In terms of class, INT had significant RAEs for all classes, whereas USA had significant RAEs only for freshmen and sophomores. All INT had significant RAEs regardless of tournament qualification status; however, USA had significant RAEs only for nontournament teams. In summary, significant RAEs exist in male Division I college soccer; however, the presence of RAEs is influenced by nationality, position, class, and NCAA tournament qualification status. Coaches should be aware of RAEs during the recruitment process to avoid potential selection bias.

Using Mathematical Programming to Select and Seed Teams for the NCAA Tournament

We develop a mathematical programming model to select, rank, and seed 68 teams for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men’s Basketball Tournament. The selections and seeding are the responsibility of a 10-person selection committee, which chooses from 351 Division I college basketball teams and considers many team-performance attributes. Our approach yields a logically consistent initial starting point based on finding dominant relationships among the teams, and the minimax objective function. We first apply the procedure to data for each of the five tournaments from 2012 to 2016 and show that our rankings align well with those of the respective committees. We then implement the procedure and obtain a set of recommendations for the 2017 NCAA tournament’s committee, prior to the announcement of its selections. Our model’s recommendations closely align with those of the committee, thus supporting our contention that the approach provides a viable, readily implemented, and easily understood basis for both informing the committee’s decisions and encouraging its members to articulate their reasons for choosing otherwise. The approach requires no training data from prior seasons or previous recommendations, and can be expanded to other applications where decision makers are tasked with selecting and ranking a set of entities that has quantifiable performance attributes.

MARCH MADNESS? UNDERREACTION TO HOT AND COLD HANDS IN NCAA BASKETBALL

The hot hand bias is the widely documented bias toward overestimation of positive serial correlation in sequential events. We test for the hot hand bias in a novel real‐world context, the seeding of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament teams. That is, we examine whether teams that perform relatively well heading into “March Madness” are seeded too high, and/or teams with poor recent performance are seeded too low. The seeds are determined by a 10‐member committee that only has implicit incentives, but these incentives are still substantial as the committee's decisions are highly scrutinized by the media, fans, and other stakeholders. We find that, contra the hot hand bias, the committee underreacts to signals of momentum heading into the NCAA tournament. Various results indicate this behavior can be attributed to both: (1) inattention to relatively detailed information indicating momentum; and (2) under‐appreciation of the predictive value of this information. Betting markets incorporate this information efficiently, but neglect some additional information that is predictive of winning NCAA tournament games but not of beating the spread. We note that the NCAA tournament has been highly popular and lucrative partly due to the “madness” (high frequency of wins by lower‐seeded teams), which the bias we document contributes to, making the persistence of bias less surprising. (JEL D83, L83)

The relationship between spending and winning in college baseball: Is this the new ‘arms race’ in college athletics?

College baseball has grown in popularity over the course of the last few years, as is evidenced by the increased national and regional broadcasts of games on television. For some schools, baseball is the third revenue-generating sport; however, the sport has not received much attention in the academic sports literature. This study seeks to fill the void in the extant literature and examines the rise in expenditures and revenues, and their impact on winning, using a sample of Power Five Conference baseball teams from 2007 to 2014. ANOVA, linear regression and logistic regression were used to find that there is a moderate, positive relationship between expenditures and success. Specifically, expenditures account for 18% of the variance in winning, and a 5% increase in win percentages is evidenced with every additional million-dollar investment in the sport. Additionally, the same investment increases the odds of qualifying for the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament by 248%, for a Super Regional by 112%, and for the College World Series by 127%. The implications of these findings, as well as recommendations to frame decision-making at the administrative level are included here.

Basketball coach receives millions in termination lawsuit

In her 16 years (two eight‐year stints) as head coach of the women's basketball team at San Diego State University, Beth Burns led the Aztecs to a 295–186 overall record and eight appearances in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Tournament. Burns was terminated in April 2013, after a program‐record 27‐win season and in the first year of a five‐year contract.

The Road to Madness: How the 1973–1974 Season Transformed College Basketball by J. Samuel Walker and Randy Roberts

Reviewed by: The Road to Madness: How the 1973–1974 Season Transformed College Basketball by J. Samuel Walker and Randy Roberts Jason A. Peterson The Road to Madness: How the 1973–1974 Season Transformed College Basketball. By J. Samuel Walker and Randy Roberts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 172. $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3023-6.) There is no doubt that the yearly basketball championship tournament of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) leaves an indelible mark on every sports fanatic's calendar. J. Samuel Walker and Randy Roberts have crafted a wonderful volume on the origins of "March Madness," focusing specifically on the 1973–1974 tournament, as it was the first to feature thirty-two teams and the last to accept only one representative per conference. Relying on a combination of archival material, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and interviews, Walker and Roberts have painted a vibrant portrait of the 1973–1974 college basketball season. The authors use a multinarrative approach to build to the national tournament, dedicating individual chapters to the plight of the dominant squad at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), led by the conservative coach John Wooden and the socially minded superstar Bill Walton; to the emergence of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) as a college basketball powerhouse, spearheaded by Norm Sloan at North Carolina State University (NC State); to midwestern basketball, highlighted by the exploits of the University of Notre Dame's media savvy head coach, Richard "Digger" Phelps, and Marquette University's rigid Al McGuire; and to the efforts of Tom Scott, the chairman of the NCAA's university division basketball committee, to open the tournament to multiple teams from the same conference. The text culminates in the NCAA tournament and devotes two chapters to the various regional contests, the historic semifinal, and NC State's ascension to basketball supremacy. The narrative's details, involving the players, coaches, and contests leading up to and within the tournament, are nothing short of spectacular. The individual stories surrounding each of the participating basketball teams supply context and demonstrate the NCAA tournament's multilayered narrative. The frequent use of famed sportswriters, such as Curry Kirkpatrick of Sports Illustrated and Arthur Daley of the New York Times, are welcome additions to the text that validate much of the basketball-related commentary. Perhaps the greatest strength of this volume comes from the examination of the drama-filled contests within the tournament, in particular, the semifinal matchup between Wooden's dominant UCLA Bruins and Sloan's NC State Wolfpack. Every individual contest supplies a seemingly unique narrative that focuses on action [End Page 1020] during games and postgame reactions, making the text an attractive option for both sports historians and average fans. Walker and Roberts also mindfully interweave the athletic exploits of the participating teams with the social and political movements of the day. The authors pay considerable attention to Walton's political views on issues such as the Vietnam War and racism as well as his propensity for participating in student-led protests. Other fascinating elements within the text include the authors' discussions of the emergence of the ACC as the preeminent basketball conference in the South and the efforts of the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, to host the yet to be anointed Final Four—both of which demonstrated the South's need for cultural validation through athletics in the considerable wake of integration, echoing Kurt Edward Kemper's contention in his stellar volume, College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era (Urbana, 2009). Despite the considerable strengths of The Road to Madness: How the 1973–1974 Season Transformed College Basketball, the volume is not without its faults. The political and social perspectives highlighted in the first two chapters go unaddressed in the remainder of the text and only reemerge in the final chapter. The authors' sweeping treatment of these issues and others rarely discussed in the book, such as the economy and the energy crisis, seems dismissive. A greater nod to these issues in an athletic context would have been a welcome addition to the volume. Regardless, The Road to Madness is a masterfully written contribution to the growing...

DOES ATHLETIC SUCCESS INFLUENCE PERSISTENCE AT HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS? NEW EVIDENCE USING PANEL DATA

This study examines the relationship between athletic success and student persistence toward a degree. We build an updated panel of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I institutions and utilize within‐institution variation to identify the effects of athletic success. Using a ranking of all institutions, we find that having more successful men's basketball and football teams has a significant positive effect on first‐year retention rates. We also find some evidence that improved basketball rankings increase graduation rates, and that success in the NCAA tournament may have a sizable impact on retention. Although the estimated effects are generally modest in scale, we find rather limited evidence of other institutional factors affecting persistence, suggesting that athletics can be one avenue for institutions of higher education to engage and retain students. (JEL I23, Z20, L83)

A generative model for predicting outcomes in college basketball

AbstractWe show that a classical model for soccer can also provide competitive results in predicting basketball outcomes. We modify the classical model in two ways in order to capture both the specific behavior of each National collegiate athletic association (NCAA) conference and different strategies of teams and conferences. Through simulated bets on six online betting houses, we show that this extension leads to better predictive performance in terms of profit we make. We compare our estimates with the probabilities predicted by the winner of the recent Kaggle competition on the 2014 NCAA tournament, and conclude that our model tends to provide results that differ more from the implicit probabilities of the betting houses and, therefore, has the potential to provide higher benefits.

The Dreaded Middle Seeds - Are They the Worst Seeds in the NCAA Basketball Tournament?

The following quote from Gregg Doyel in reference to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball tournament appeared on CBSSports.com on March 21, 2009. “For teams with a realistic chance at winning multiple games in the NCAA tournament,…the worst seed to have is the No. 8 or the No. 9. That’s statistical certainty.” Is it really “statistical certainty”? This papers attempts to answer this question. Data concerning the number of games won by teams seeded 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 were collected from the NCAA men’s and women’s tournament brackets dating back to 1985 and 1994, respectively. It was found that among all teams entering the tournament, the 10, 11, and 12 seeds do not appear to have a statistical advantage over the 8/9 seeds. However, if only teams that win their first game are considered, the 10 seeds have a significantly greater mean number of wins than the 8/9 seeds in the men’s tournament; and the 10, 11, and 12 seeds in the men’s tournament and the 11 seeds in the women’s tournament have advanced to the Sweet Sixteen (at least two wins) a significantly greater proportion of times than the 8/9 seeds.

Using ‘‘Dominetrics’’ to Impose Greater Discipline on Performance Rankings

Importing the methodology of Cherchye and Vermeulen (2006), the authors discuss the many ways ‘‘dominetrics’’ can measure performance. They then apply the approach to National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men’s basketball rankings. The ordinal approach they take removes some subjectivity from the Rating Percentage Index (RPI). Just as Pareto relationships are obtained without subjective cardinal weighting schemes, the dominance relationships applied here eliminate the subjectivity of cardinal weighting. Because heated debate inevitably ensues after the NCAA Selection Committee’s announcement of at-large invitees to the NCAA tournament, the subjectivity-minimizing dominetric provides a barometer for evaluating the relative qualities of college basketball teams.

Corruption in College Basketball? Evidence of Tanking in Postseason Conference Tournaments

This article observes that regular-season champions in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball often perform poorly in season-ending conference tournaments and examines two alternative explanations for this underperformance. We employ data on regular-season champions during the period 1990-2004 to test between competing models of “tanking” motivated by (a) fitness saving for the NCAA tournament and (b) a form of corruption. Our empirical results confirm that systematic under-performance does occur and indicate that corruption is a likely motivation.

Lynch Syndrome: Form, Function, Proteins, and Basketball

Lynch Syndrome: Form, Function, Proteins, and Basketball

Title IX: Equality for Women's Sports?

Since their beginnings in 1859 with a crew race between Harvard and Yale, intercollegiate athletics have been central to the mythology of American universities. Varsity football dominates the fall social calendar of student life; “ homecoming,” timed to coincide with an important football game, evokes alumni nostalgia. Winter is the season for varsity basketball, culminating in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) national championship tournaments in early spring. Until quite recently, the participants in intercollegiate varsity sports were nearly all men. The entry of women competitors into the apparently glorious haze of intercollegiate athletics has been belated and awkward. With the passage of Title IX in 1972, universities were required to provide equal opportunity in all of their federally funded programs. Most moved quickly to establish varsity sports teams for women in numbers roughly equal to their offerings for men. The near similarity in numbers of teams, however, belies important continuing differences. Football remains a major source of attention, revenue, and expenditure. Men’s basketball is also a high-profile activity; women’s basketball, particularly with the NCAA tournament and television exposure, recently has taken some steps towards suc­ cess on the male model. In nonrevenue sports, from skiing and ice hockey to swimming and water polo, although teams are fielded in roughly equal numbers, participation and expenditure rates remain higher for men, in ratios that far exceed the proportions of men in overall enrollments. The rosy glow of college athletics, perhaps always exaggerated, has been fading of late. Even football is a losing proposition on most campuses. Sperber (27), Thelin (29), and others report mismanagement, overexpenditure, and corrup­ tion. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, the private body that regulates intercollegiate athletics, has been criticized for behaving as an economic cartel by Fleisher, Goff, and Tollison (), Hart-Nibbrig and Cottingham (11), and Lawrence (13), among others. Colleges are rebuked for exploiting, not educating athletes; premier athletes themselves exit early, in increasingly greater numbers, to professional opportunities. Faculties and even university presidents seek, with uneven success, to establish greater control over intercollegiate athletics. As universities confront shrinking academic budgets, athletics expenditures, often more than 5% of the institution’s total, are viewed with mounting concern (30). Universities are urged to sell off their money-making sports teams as separate businesses and to abolish the remainder, leaving only intramural activities that

BEHAVIORAL MOMENTUM IN COLLEGE BASKETBALL

Three classes of events were scored from videotapes of 14 college basketball games during the 1989 National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament: reinforcers (such as points and favorable turnovers), adversities (such as missed shots, unfavorable turnovers, and fouls), and responses to adversities (favorable or unfavorable outcomes of the first possession of the ball following an adversity). Within-game and within-team analyses of these data supported three findings. First, a team's favorable response to an adversity generally increased as the rate of reinforcement increased 3 min preceding the adversity. Second, basketball coaches called time-out from play when being outscored by their opponents an average of 2.63 to 1.0. Third, calling time-outs from play appeared to be an effective intervention for reducing an opponent's rate of reinforcement. Rates of reinforcement during the 3 min immediately after a time-out were nearly equal for both teams. Results are discussed within a behavioral momentum framework.