Louisville is FiveThirtyEight’s pick to win the NCAA tournament even though it’s a No. 4 seed. That doesn’t reflect a bluegrass bias, or a weak draw, or a bug in the model (we hope). Instead, it reflects how massively underseeded the Cardinals are. According to our calculations, Louisville is the seventh-most underseeded team in the past 12 tournaments, and the most aggrieved this year.
That’s the good news for Cardinals fans, whose team has a 15 percent chance of winning the title, according to our model. Louisville is also the plurality pick for Midwest Region champion of ESPN, Yahoo and CBS readers who picked brackets. It even has the backing of President Obama, who has the defending champion Cardinals returning to the final (though losing to Michigan State).
Now here’s the bad news: Although teams that receive rough treatment from the selection committee outperform their seed on average, there are plenty of exceptions. The most underseeded team among top-four seeds since 2003 — Memphis in 2009, a No. 2 seed rated by some analysts as the strongest team in the country — lost in the Sweet Sixteen.
We can place Louisville’s No. 4 seed in historical context in several ways, none ideal. I chose to calculate, for each team in the tournament since 200333, its expected winning percentage against the other teams that received that seed during that period, using ratings from college basketball analyst Ken Pomeroy. So, I’m pitting Louisville against the other 47 teams that got No. 4 seeds since 2003, in a hypothetical mini-season, to see how much stronger the Cardinals are than their peers.34
According to these calculations, Louisville would have won 69.8 percent of games against other No. 4 seeds, assuming strength in each season was the same. That’s the highest winning percentage relative to seed since 2003 for a No. 4 seed. At the other end of the spectrum, Vanderbilt, in 2008, would have beaten just 29.6 percent of fellow No. 4 seeds — the lowest of the group.
These calculations don’t necessarily mean the selection committee hasn’t done its job when seedings don’t perfectly reflect team strength. Some years, the gap between the four best teams and the next four — or eight or 12 — is greater than it is in other years. Also, sometimes rules such as preventing early meetings between conference rivals can force the committee’s hand. This season, the committee mostly got things right. Only one team other than Louisville is badly underseeded: Tennessee, the No. 11 seed in the Midwest.
However, the selection committee chairman, Ron Wellman, said that his panel continues to use Rating Percentage Index to evaluate whether brackets are balanced. RPI’s continued influence, despite its well-known drawbacks, suggests that some teams do get bad breaks.
One reason the committee might not feel it needs to change its seeding practices: Teams like Louisville haven’t always soared. Despite being stronger than their seeds suggest, many underseeded teams underperform.
Five of the six teams that were more underseeded than Louisville fell flat. Four lost their first games. (One of those, Lamar in 2012, lost a play-in game.) Memphis, in 2009, fell in the round of 16 despite its impressive stats. Only Florida last year, as a strong No. 3 seed, exceeded expectations, falling in the Elite Eight.
Outperformance of seed is a tricky concept. The simplest way to evaluate how teams should do is to assume they should beat all lower seeds, but that supposes that all No. 1 seeds will always make the Final Four, which is far from automatic. So for each team since 2003, I started with the number of games it won — from the round of 64 on — and subtracted from that the average number of wins for all other teams in that period with that seed.35 So, for instance, the average No. 2 seed since 2003, excluding Memphis in 2009, won 2.4 games. Memphis won two. So it underperformed by four-tenths of a game.
There’s a small, positive correlation36 between a team’s hypothetical winning percentage against teams with the same seed and a team’s wins relative to expected wins for its seed. So, on balance, teams that are underseeded do prove the selection committee wrong. But the effect is so minor, and clouded by so many exceptions, that they hardly add up to a compelling case against controversial seeding decisions. There are too many examples like Memphis in 2009 to set against cases such as Davidson in 2008, a No. 10 seed that would win two-thirds of games against other 10 seeds and that made the Final Four.
| Team | Year | Seed | Avg | Games won | Expected wins | Over-performance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Utah St. | 2005 | 14 | 77% | 0 | 0.09 | -0.09 |
| Belmont | 2011 | 13 | 71% | 0 | 0.30 | -0.30 |
| Memphis | 2009 | 2 | 70% | 2 | 2.40 | -0.40 |
| Pittsburgh | 2013 | 8 | 70% | 0 | 0.67 | -0.67 |
| Florida | 2013 | 3 | 70% | 3 | 2.16 | 0.84 |
| Louisville | 2014 | 4 | 70% | TBD | 1.48 | TBD |
| Virginia | 2007 | 4 | 30% | 1 | 1.49 | -0.49 |
| Gonzaga | 2006 | 3 | 30% | 2 | 2.19 | -0.19 |
| Vanderbilt | 2008 | 4 | 30% | 0 | 1.51 | -1.51 |
| UNC Asheville | 2003 | 16 | 27% | 0 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Miss. Valley St. | 2008 | 16 | 26% | 0 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
Louisville can search its own media guide for examples of teams that should have done better than their seeds but didn’t. In 2004, the Cardinals were heavily underseeded at No. 10. That suggested they were between the 37th- and 40th-strongest team in the tournament, despite being ranked 16th in Pomeroy’s ratings. Louisville drew a Xavier team that was ranked lower by Pomeroy but that lost by 10. In 2011, like this year, Louisville got a No. 4 seed it could have complained about, because Pomeroy rated the Cardinals 11th and five teams rated lower got better seeds. Yet the Cardinals lost their first tournament game.
The potential for upsets that makes the NCAA tournament so exciting could also reduce the Cardinals quickly from title favorite to disappointment, which would end any debate over whether they were underseeded. Anyone lobbying the selection committee to reconsider its decisions should beware of staking the case on any one team, even one as strong and as underseeded as Louisville is. After all, even our model anointing it the favorite gives Louisville an 85 percent chance of not repeating as champions.