March Madness Economics
What 40 years of NCAA tournament data reveals about expert judgment, market efficiency, and the price of a three-pointer
The pool tracker lives on the homepage. This archive keeps the long-form analysis series intact as a separate section of the site.
Does Tournament Experience Matter?
Coaches with 15+ tournament appearances average 2.22 wins vs 0.52 for first-timers. The effect holds after controlling for seed quality — experience isn’t just a proxy for having good teams.
2025 Bracket: The Coaching Map
Florida and Duke enter as 1-seeds with thin coaching resumes. Calipari vs. Self as 10 vs. 7 seed pits two 57-win coaches against the bracket.
Seeding & Expert Fallibility
The selection committee’s 27% upset rate has been flat for 40 years. The 11-seed anomaly, the 5-vs-12 problem, and conference bias — the committee’s “prices” have persistent, measurable errors.
Experts vs. Simple Heuristics
The committee picks winners at 71.4%. A simple win count captures 90% of that predictive power. Only 7 of 193 computer ranking systems beat the committee — and none by much.
When Coaching Meets Seeding
Upset rates jump from 26% to 38% when the underdog has a coaching experience edge. At 5+ more appearances, the upset rate hits 44–45% — nearly a coin flip.
Bracket Pool Simulation
Chalk averages 387 points vs. coaching’s 306. The lesson: knowing ≠ profiting — exponential scoring punishes upset strategies.
The Selective Upset Strategy
Use coaching only in Round 1, chalk from there. When limited to high-conviction picks (5+ experience gap), upsets hit at a 52% rate — a slightly loaded coin in a field of chalk pickers.
The Three-Point Arbitrage
For 20 years, threes were underpriced. In 2025, the expected value inverted for the first time. Volume up 26%, accuracy flat, two-point efficiency rising — a textbook market correction that took two decades.
The Hidden Cost of the Miss
The standard EV calculation ignores rebound economics. Missed threes produce 20% fewer offensive rebounds than missed twos, swinging the EV gap by 0.049 points per shot against the three.
Accuracy, Not Volume
Three-point volume has a +0.023 correlation with winning — zero. Three-point accuracy: +0.446. And three-point defense may matter even more than offense.