These Teams Could Be Your Men's March Madness Sleepers
These Teams Could Be Your Men's March Madness Sleepers
Let's look at the teams in the NCAA men's tournament who might be undervalued.
As part of my pre-March Madness college basketball research, I like to look at data points that could be leading indicators for success in the NCAA tournament. There are a number of these to choose from, including the coaching research I did the other day as well as a few factors we used to include in our Giant Killers model at ESPN. But today, let’s look a couple of my absolute favorite tried-and-true methods of identifying teams that could be better than expected in the tourney.
(Note: All data in this story is as of Wednesday afternoon, March 13.)
Polling for talent
One of the best — yet still undercovered — ways of finding tournament sleepers is to look at the preseason (yes, the preseason) AP poll. At FiveThirtyEight, our research found that teams who were ranked highly before the season but underachieved during the regular season tend to outperform statistical power rankings (like the venerable KenPom ratings) in the NCAA tourney. Flip things around, and high-seeded teams who went into the season ranked lower — or outright unranked — tend to underperform.
It may seem counterintuitive, but the preseason poll captures something about a team’s underlying talent that, in the absence of key injuries, persists even after the team has played a large sample of games.
This year, that might mean being wary of Iowa State (unranked), Baylor (No. 20), UNC (No. 19) and Arizona (No. 12), all of whom are on pace for top-3 seeds as per BracketMatrix.
And for the sleepers, here’s a table of all the teams that appear in at least 25% of BracketMatrix’s collected brackets and are tracking for a seed between Nos. 4-12 — the types of teams that are usually below 50% to make the tournament’s second weekend, but still have at least some shot at a run.
Michigan State (18-13, 10-10 in Big Ten) is the big headliner here, having gone into the year ranked fourth in the nation before a maddeningly up-and-down season. FAU (24-7 ,14-4 AAC) is another fascinating entry, coming off last year’s Cinderella Final Four run, while nobody quite knows what to do with Gonzaga (25-7, 14-2 WCC). And we can’t ignore the possibility that John Calipari (a coach with one of the best tourney track records) and Kentucky (23-8, 13-5 SEC) make another of those deep runs from an unexpected seed.
In search of luck
This one is even more intuitive. Ken Pomeroy has a stat called “Luck”, which measures the difference between a team’s actual winning percentage and the one we’d expect from its points scored and allowed (i.e., the Pythagorean Formula). The theory is that teams who win a lot of close games and/or get blown out in their losses were lucky not to lose more, while teams who lose a lot of close games but otherwise win by healthy margins should probably have better records.
All else being equal, we’d expect both of those luck factors to even out going forward — which is bad news for tournament teams who got by on lucky wins, but maybe good news for teams who snuck in despite poor luck.
This year, there aren’t a huge number of teams in line for top seeds who got especially lucky. The highest-ranked teams tracking for a top-3 seed are Purdue (56th in Luck), Kansas (70th), UConn (77th) and Houston (97th). I’m not sure exactly how much stock I’d put into thinking any of them are vulnerable, though — the Boilermakers, Huskies and Cougars are probably going to be the 3 highest seeds in the entire tourney field, and you sort of need some luck to end up in that place.
The other end of the luck spectrum is interesting, though. Here are the unluckiest teams in our group on track for seed Nos. 4-12:
Well hey, what do you know? There’s Sparty again. Not only is Michigan State our top preseason-poll underachiever, but they’re also the unluckiest team in our sample. Does this mean the Spartans are threats to provide another patented Tom Izzo trip to the Final Four when their luck turns around? Maybe. Certainly they have some of the hallmarks we’d expect from a team capable of that kind of run.
There are a few other teams on both lists: Gonzaga, Illinois (23-8, 14-6 Big Ten) and San Diego State (22-9, 11-7 MWC). It stands to reason that the two factors might go hand-in-hand on a certain level — a really good team could end up with a so-so record (and a lower seed) by virtue of losing a bunch of winnable games.
In each case, it means a team likely to be seeded below the level of its actual talent — and more often than not, that’s an essential element of a surprise run through the tournament.
Filed under: College basketball