Document Type

Capstone Project

Publication Date

5-21-2026

Publication Title

UNLV Undergraduate Economics Working Paper Series

Publisher

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Publisher Location

Las Vegas (Nev.)

Volume

3

Issue

2

First page number:

1

Last page number:

10

Abstract

This paper examines whether tournament seed and team efficiency ratings help explain how far teams advance in the NCAA men's basketball tournament. Using Bart Torvik NCAA basketball ratings data from 2008 to 2025, I construct a team-year dataset with tournament advancement measured from 1 to 7, where higher values represent deeper runs. The main independent variables are seed, net efficiency, offensive efficiency, and defensive efficiency. Descriptive statistics, correlations, scatterplots, and OLS regressions are used to test whether better-seeded and more efficient teams advance further. The results show that seed is the strongest and most consistent predictor of advancement, but efficiency ratings still matter after controlling for seed. Net efficiency is positive and statistically significant, while offensive efficiency is positive and defensive efficiency is negative when the two sides of the ball are separated. Overall, the findings suggest that March Madness contains a large amount of randomness, but tournament success is still strongly related to team quality.

Keywords

March Madness; NCAA tournament; tournament advancement; seed; basketball efficiency; OLS

Disciplines

Economics | Sports Management | Sports Studies

File Format

PDF

File Size

302 KB

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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