Written by Cecilia Morales-Barraza:
As the days of excitement for football games and abundant school spirit fade into distant memory, the most anticipated time in college basketball begins. With every game in this yearly NCAA D1 basketball tournament, new data becomes available for analysis.
Women on the Rise
Women’s teams have been competing in the NCAA basketball tournament since 1982 and have seen a spike in their fanbases in the most recent years. This season, the University of Michigan women’s basketball team, who ended the regular season with a 22-9 record, is attending the tournament as a No. 6 seed.
The record for the highest number of appearances in a women’s March Madness tournament is held by the University of Tennessee, with 41 appearances – attending every tournament in women’s NCAA history. The University of Connecticut takes the lead with the most national championship titles,11, with Tennessee right behind them at 8.
For years, the NCAA women’s basketball teams have been fighting to gain the same recognition and resources that are given to the men’s teams. The NCAA was called out repeatedly by players for providing women’s teams with lousy gift bags and poor training facilities compared to the men’s. It wasn’t until 2021 that the NCAA began to use the “March Madness” slogan and logo for the women’s tournaments.
Luckily, there has been an upward trend in viewership of women’s games, noticed early on in 2022 when 216,890 people attended the first and second rounds of the tournament. By the time of the national championship, viewership peaked at 5.91 million, which was an 18% increase from 2021, and 30% higher than in 2019.
Bracket Challenge
Half of the March Madness fun involves crafting brackets and competing with friends to see whose intuition is most precise. According to Morning Consult’s interest tracking, 23% of Americans said they intended to fill out a bracket for the 2023 men’s tournament, a record high since 2017.
When making their predictions, some choose to carefully study the teams throughout the season, while others trust their gut feeling or flip a coin. An individual familiar with college basketball has 1 in 120.2 billion odds of creating a flawless bracket, a decent step up from the 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 odds if the bracket is made by flipping a coin. The longest verified streak of accurate March Madness predictions was set in 2019 by a man who got 49 correct picks in a row.
Bracket Busters
According to the NCAA, an “upset” is when the winning team is seeded at least two seed lines worse than their opponent. Due to their unpredictability, these upsets create an exciting flip of the script when they occur, but ultimately result in many ruined brackets. In 77% of the last 36 seasons, the number of upsets within an NCAA tournament has lied between 10 and 16, with an annual average of 12.4 total upsets. The most common upset in the first round of the tournament is a 10th seed beating a 7th seed, which has happened 52 times since 1985. For second-round upsets, the 6th seed beating the 3rd seed is the most common, which has occurred 29 times.
Notable Records
The first NCAA men’s basketball tournament champions were the Oregon Ducks in 1939. Since then, the March Madness tournament has expanded from 8 teams to 64, averaging 10.7 million viewers per game in 2022 with a record-breaking amount of 18.1 million viewers for the final.
The Kentucky Wildcats hold the current record for March Madness tournament appearances and game wins, totaling 55 and 129, with an average of 2.2 wins per appearance.
UCLA holds the record for March Madness championships, with 11 titles. This puts the Bruins at 13.25% of the total tournament wins, with 10 of these championships won under the same coach, John Wooden, between 1964 and 1975.
Duke University player Christian Laettner has scored the most points in NCAA tournaments, racking up 407 points between 1989 and 1992. The highest-scoring tournament game occurred in 1990, where Loyola Marymount with 149 points, led the University of Michigan in a 264-point game.
2023
This year, ESPN had a record amount of completed brackets for the men’s tournament challenge with over 20 million. Already, there are 0 perfect brackets left in the men’s tournament, with West Virginia’s loss having the biggest impact, ruining 10,272,984 brackets.
People’s top pick for the men’s March Madness champion is Alabama, with 55% of the ESPN brackets predicting them as the winner.
Over 2 million brackets were filled out for the ESPN women’s tournament challenge, with no perfect brackets left after day three of the tournament. Marquette’s 2-point loss against South Florida was the biggest bracket killer, resulting in 1,015,055 fallen brackets. The “people’s pick” for the women’s tournament is the University of South Carolina, with 87% of brackets holding them as the champion.
We’re one week into the 2023 tournament, and there are already records being broken daily. With an average of 8.4 million viewers for the men’s opening afternoon games, there has been a 2% increase from 2022 and a peak amount of views for first-day games since 2015. As this March Madness continues, not only will there be thrilling spectacles for devoted basketball fans, but new data will enlighten the public with insights and opportunities for continued analysis.