Determinants of March Madness Tournament Advancement

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.