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Before the tournament, I proclaimed that preseason AP poll has an uncanny ability to identify overrated teams. Since 1985, there have been 39 teams that satisfy these criteria:

• Started the season outside the top 25 in the AP poll.
• Entered the tournament as a 1 or 2 seed.

None of these teams has made the Final Four.

This year, St. John’s has already gone down as a 2 seed in the West Region. They lost to a talented Arkansas team. That leaves 2 seed Michigan State as the remaining team left that fits these two criteria.

Avid Sports Reader on social media questioned these results, noting that teams outside the preseason AP top 25 make the Final Four all the time. What’s the big deal about the few that end up as top seeds?

This is a good question that made me dig back into the data. Since 2002, 17 of 88 Final Four teams started the season outside the top 25 of the AP poll. That’s 19.3% of Final Four teams.

Crap.

To show how often this happens, let’s go back two seasons to the 2023 tournament. Three of the Final Four teams started the season outside the AP poll top 25, including eventual champion Connecticut. The fourth team San Diego State wasn’t exactly deemed a title contender before the season (20th).

A little more code revealed that almost a thousand tournament teams started the season outside the top 25 in the AP poll (992 out of 1468) . I should not have drawn a conclusion based on only 39 of these teams. Basketball is too random for that.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve been fooled by the small sample size of the tournament. In 2014, I made a big deal in Grantland about how tournament champions never shot a high rate of three pointers. Villanova soon won two national championships. It turns out that 12 teams is an even smaller sample size than 39.

The preseason AP poll is still a remarkable predictor of tournament performance. It probably has the ability to identify overrated teams. The problem is that I made too big a deal about a sample size result, and that shouldn’t happen.

Let’s use all the data to make a prediction for Michigan State in the South region this weekend.

The Spartans have their strengths and weaknesses like all teams. They can’t shoot the three, as their 31.0% is 323rd in the nation out of 364 teams. However, Michigan State can play defense, as they rank 5th in my adjusted points per possession.

My best numbers make them a 3.5 point favorite over Mississippi on Friday night.

In addition, the South is the region that I expected a surprise Final Four team. Auburn might be the top seed according the committee, but they’re 4th in my member college basketball rankings. This also makes them a distant 4th among the 1 seeds in the tournament.

If Michigan State played Auburn in the Elite Eight, I’d make Sparty only a 3.5 point underdog. They would be a 4 point favorite over Michigan.

Michigan State can certainly go the Final Four this season.

Smarter sports betting in less than 5 minutes

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