March Madness Seeds

By Brian Gabrielle - Covers Experts

The reality with any spread sport (NFL, NBA, CFB &CBK) is this: the team who wins the game also covers the spread 76% of the time. Now, considering that there are a total of 63 games from start to finish in the Big Dance, the thinking is, if you pick all the winners you could expect to finish with an ATS record of 49-14, which is not a bad year's work.

Following that train of thought, the obvious key to picking all 63 winners is in being able to identify the underdogs who win outright as obviously, these "upsets" have a 100% ATS rate which would account for a heavy portion of your 49-14 record.

Given the importance of Big Dance "upsets", let's reverse engineer the process and see if we can't narrow down the window of opportunity where these golden eggs may be found. Remember, if we can identify the 63 winners then we can expect an overall record of approximately 49-14. So let's keep it simple at this stage and make it our sole pursuit to identify the 63 winners. We'll start with the raw data - the numeric truths which assist us in this pursuit.

To start with, we can examine the seed history of the tournament (dating back to '85 when the tourney expanded to 64 teams), which tells us that 16th seeds are 0-72 , while 15th seeds are 4-68 in the history of the tournament making a combined 4-140 record dating back to 1985 . That tells us that we are reasonable safe in assuming that all 1st & 2nd seeds will survive the first round. That takes the burden of 63 games down to 55.

14th seeds are 15-57 and 13th seeds are 17-55, giving them a combined record of 33-111. They pull an upset once in every four attempts, so it would be reasonable to expect that if we stayed with all 8 of the 3rd & 4th seeds, we would end up with 6 of 8 straight up winners in round 1.

Now, of the 32 13th & 14th seeds to win a first round match, only 5 have gone on to win in the second round, so if we assume that 2 get by the first round in then we could also reasonably expect to win both of our second round games by betting against them in round two. That eliminates the burden of 10 games and reduces us to 45 more to deal with and accepting 2 losses. (*Note* All five 13 & 14 seeds to advance were Conference Champions - an At Large bid has never pulled an upset from the 13/14 hole and gone on to win in the second round)

That brings us to the 5th through 12th seeds which is the land of upsets, but don't despair. Thanks to technical analysis, we know a thing or two about the nature of these upsets. You see, there are two ways to get to the Big Dance - you can earn it by winning your conference, or you can get there by political means and get invited as an "at large" bid. For starters, an accurate set of Power Ratings is a must-have tool. When the teams are seeded , they are done so by the NCAA RPI which addresses wins & losses but is not as accurate as those used in the gaming industry. After the NCAA seeds the tourney, do your own seeding and identify teams who are improperly seeded and thus offer a great amount of value in the numbers. This type of mis-seeding will account for 2 more first round upsets, leaving 43 games to work with.

Now, 6 out of every 7 occasions an upset coming from properly seeded matchups comes from an Automatic Bid rising to the occasion and upsetting an At Large bid. The notion that "it doesn't matter how you got here" is nonsense. Character teams who were good enough to win their conference tournaments are ALWAYS more dangerous than those invited through the good ol' boys network. In every sense of the word, astute handicappers know that the Conference Tournaments are an "audition" for the main event.

Moreover, there is a very high percentage of "upsets" when 2 "at large" bids face each other. The underdog will pull the upset near 50% of the time when two top ranked (top 32) "at large" teams face each other, so when we are looking for upsets, look for them when 2 at large bids meet and when teams who are seeded9th through 12th are teams who are earned bids facing favored teams who are "at large" bids.

More seeding notes:

Since 1985, a #1 seed has won 11 titles and finished second 7 times but never have all four #1s made it to the Final Four.

There have been 21 teams with records of .500 or worse. They have never won a game in the field of 64. (Note: A losing team did win in the play-in game in 2003 UNCA over Texas-Southern)

Only two teams (North Carolina and Wisconsin in 2000) have made the Final Four with 13 or more losses.

Since they started seeding teams in 1979, no seed lower than #8 (Villanova, 1985) has won a national title.

No 5 or 7 seed has ever won a national title.

There have only been two teams seeded lower than eighth to make a Final Four.