BOSTON — If you’ve always wondered why a No. 16 seed has never beaten a No. 1 seed in the men’s NCAA basketball tournament, then one of the top analytics minds in sports and politics is right there with you.
FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver spoke in a 1-on-1 panel Saturday with Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey at the 2016 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and he didn’t have a solution as to why none of the lowest-ranked teams have ever made it past the first round. In fact, Silver thinks it should have happened by now.
“In the men’s tournament, it hasn’t happened of course,” Silver said. “I think it’s actually kind of a fluke that it hasn’t happened yet actually. We’ve gone back and tried to kind of retrocast every NCAA Tournament, and typically 16 seeds would have somewhere between a .5 percent and a 5 percent chance with about 2 percent on average. I forget how many trials there have been, but you would have expected there to be some upset at one point in time.”
Overall, a No. 16 seed has only beaten a No. 1 seed in a Division-I NCAA Tournament once, when Harvard’s women’s team beat the top-ranked Stanford team 71-67 in 1998. And Silver thinks it’s only a matter of time before it happens for the men.
“Parity is getting — the one seeds aren’t as dominant as they used to be,” Silver said. “You’re not UCLA in the 1960s. So we’ll see that sooner or later.”
Thumbnail photo via Bob Donnan/USA TODAY Sports Images
