Yesterday, I introduced a new metric to the world of college sports, the Madness Metric. By subtracting the expected sum of the two seeds in each round, assuming only favorites win, from the sum of the seeds of the teams that are actually playing, we can get a fairly good sense of just how mad March Madness has really been. Now that the first round (the round of 64, which is officially called the second round but which everyone reasonable calls the first round) is done, I thought it would be a good idea to check in on our new metric and calculate it for the first time. We’ll do it by region or quarter of the overall field. Each region has teams ranked or seeded from 1-16. In the first round, 1 plays 16, 2 plays 15, and so on. In the second round, starting today, if all the favorites had won, 1 would play 8, 2 would play 7, 3 would play 6, and 4 would play 5. As you know from watching the last couple days of basketball, that’s not exactly how it worked out. The Madness Metric will tell us just how far off we are:
East (+5): Thanks to 11 seed Dayton beating 6 seed Providence. Many people feel like this wasn’t exactly fair because Dayton played their first game, the play-in game in their home stadium, and then this game nearby. Every other favorite in this region won their games.
Midwest (0): Not mad at all! All the favorites won.
West (+11): 10 seed Ohio State University beat 7 seeded VCU, but most of the +11 is due to the darlings of the tournament so far, 14 seed Georgia State which beat 3 seed Baylor, sending themselves to the round of 32 and their coach to the floor.
South (+16): This is the craziest of the regions and all its lunacy will be concentrated into one round of 32 game between 11 seed UCLA and 14 seed UAB. One of these Cinderella teams will be going to the sweet sixteen at least.
Total (+32): This is the first time I’ve ever calculated this metric, so I’m not sure about its history, but this doesn’t seem as crazy overall as one would have expected given that the first day was said to have been the craziest day ever. I’d have to do some historical analysis to figure this out.
As the tournament goes on, I’ll keep you posted about just how crazy it is. Thanks for reading.