Ncaa bracket picks upsets
Did the committee get things weirdly right this year?
And for bracket-pickers, is that even a good thing?Certainly the seeds this year more closely follow what the statistics would recommend.Spearman rank correlation coefficient between a teams overall seed (according to the selection committees list) and its place in our Elo rankings.941 this season, higher than in the 2018 (0.926 2017 (0.912) and 2016 (0.893) tournaments.
One reason for the lack of instant upset picks is that the committee appears to have done a better job seeding this year even if Tom Izzo and Michigan State fans might feel differently.Moreover, this years top seeds are generally stronger than in recent seasons at least outside the.According to Elo, each seed number from.7 contains a significantly stronger team this year than it did in the previous tournaments this decade: Relative to the field, this years.1 seeds are basically the same level of strength as usual.
But a much stronger crop of teams on the next six seed lines naturally makes it harder to find good upset picks, particularly in the early rounds.One very interesting component of that, however, is that it hasnt been caused by seeding more power-conference schools in the top half of each regions seeds.If anything, the opposite is true: Headlined by tiny Wofford as the.7 seed in the Midwest and Buffalo as the.6 in the West, small-conference schools were acknowledged by the committee as much as ever.Since 2010, there hasnt been a season where more teams outside of major conferences got top-seven seeds in the tournament than in 2019.
(Plus, the Ohio Valley managed to get two teams into the tournament Belmont and Murray State.) At the same time, major-conference schools are getting an abnormal number of bad seeds: Using the same definition as above, 11 different major-conference teams.All of this paints a picture of college basketballs changing landscape, with better mid-major schools getting more credit for their accomplishments, leading to a better bracket overall.The only hitch in this development might just be for fans of interesting tournament-pool picks.
