A year ago, it seemed like the NCAA Tournament’s era of parity was under attack. Kentucky had just wrapped up an undefeated regular season and was looking so powerful that the FiveThirtyEight model assigned the Wildcats a 41 percent probability of winning the tourney before it even began. (By comparison, most pre-tournament favorites of recent […]
UPDATE (6:30 p.m. March 18): We’ve updated this post to add information about the excitement index. Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts of the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments. We’ve been issuing probabilistic March Madness forecasts in some form since 2011, when FiveThirtyEight was just a couple of us writing for The New York Times. While […]
UPDATE (6:30 p.m. March 18): We’ve updated this post to add information about the excitement index. Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts of the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments. We’ve been issuing probabilistic March Madness forecasts in some form since 2011, when FiveThirtyEight was just a couple of us writing for The New York Times. While […]
Going into conference tournament week, the Gonzaga Bulldogs were no lock to extend their string of consecutive NCAA tourney berths to 18 years. To maintain the streak, the Zags probably needed to run the West Coast Conference tournament table, since an at-large bid was unlikely with seven losses on their résumé. The automatic-bid route was […]
Going into conference tournament week, the Gonzaga Bulldogs were no lock to extend their string of consecutive NCAA tourney berths to 18 years. To maintain the streak, the Zags probably needed to run the West Coast Conference tournament table, since an at-large bid was unlikely with seven losses on their résumé. The automatic-bid route was […]
