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The top 10 college basketball teams in 2015 by Sweet 16 appearances

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tom_izzoWhich school has the best college basketball program?

It’s an easy question to answer with only analytics. We could take an average rating from computer rankings over the past 10 years to find the best programs.

However, college basketball is a sport that almost entirely relies on the postseason for its popularity. Any legitimate ranking must consider success in the NCAA tournament.

To balance analytics with post season success, I propose ranking programs by Sweet 16 appearances over the past 10 years. With such a long time period, it’s difficult for a non-elite team by the numbers to have enough tournament success to make this list. The top 10 below includes all the traditional college basketball powers.

In addition, the Sweet 16 seems like an appropriate balance between making the tournament and winning the entire contest. It’s not enough to just make the field every year, but there’s too much randomness in winning the tourney. In the past 10 years, only two programs have won more than one tournament (Florida and Connecticut), and neither made the tournament in 2015.

To break ties among programs with the same number of Sweet 16 appearances over the last 10 years, I looked at appearances in the past 9 seasons. If this didn’t break the tie, I looked at successively shorter time periods until one program came out ahead.

The rankings below show the top 10 college basketball programs by Sweet 16 appearances. Only one program had 7 appearances over 10 years, which shows the parity in college basketball. Even the best programs have years in which they lose before the second weekend of the tournament.

Teams that missed the cut

Gonzaga has made the tournament each of the past 10 years but did not make this list. While they have become a brand name program in college basketball, Gonzaga has struggled in the tournament with only 3 Sweet 16 appearances.

Ohio State and UCLA have 5 Sweet 16 appearances each but lost out to the teams below based on the tie breaker method. Ohio State hasn’t make the second weekend of the tournament the last two years, while UCLA had 3 straight appearances early in the 10 year window.

10. Xavier

5 Sweet 16’s: 2015, 2012, 2010, 2009, 2008

Xavier is the only program in the top 10 not from a power conference. Sean Miller led the Musketeers to the first two Sweet 16 appearances, while Chris Mack has reached the Sweet 16 in half of his 6 seasons.

9. Wisconsin

5 Sweet 16’s: 2015, 2014, 2012, 2011, 2008

Bo Ryan has made the NCAA tournament in each of his 14 years as Wisconsin’s coach. They have made the Sweet 16 in half of the past 10 years, and the 2015 team led by Frank Kaminsky might be the best of all these teams.

8. Arizona

5 Sweet 16’s: 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2009

Sean Miller coached Arizona for the last 4 Sweet 16 appearances. However, Arizona only had 1 appearance between 2006 and 2010 as the program transitioned from long time coach Lute Olsen to Miller.

Arizona has a great team in 2015, and I think they have the best chance of beating Kentucky should they play in the Final Four.

7. Kentucky

5 Sweet 16’s: 2015, 2014, 2012, 2011, 2010

With their undefeated season so far in 2014-2015, one might expect Kentucky to be higher on this list. However, the Wildcats struggled in the early years of this 10 year period as they transitioned from Tubby Smith to Billy Gillispie (whoa, remember him?) to John Calipari.

Even within the last 5 years, Kentucky had a down year in 2013 when they lost to Robert Morris in the first round of the NIT. Even the best programs can’t escape the vagaries of luck in this era of one and done players.

6. Florida

6 Sweet 16’s: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2007, 2006

Billy Donovan has had tremendous success at Florida, winning back to back championships in 2006 and 2007. However, it doesn’t always run smoothly in Gainesville. Florida didn’t make the tournament in 2008 and 2009 when the stars from the championship teams left. They also didn’t make the tournament this year.

5. Duke

6 Sweet 16’s: 2015, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2006

Back in the Christian Laettner years, Duke made four straight Final Four appearances and won two championships. Even Mike Krzyzewski can’t duplicate that success in this era of parity and one and done players.

Duke has fallen victim to two of the biggest Round of 64 upsets recently, as they lost to 15 seed Lehigh in 2012 and 14 seed Mercer in 2014.

4. Kansas

6 Sweet 16’s: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2007

Bill Self has an incredible streak of 11 straight Big 12 regular season championships. He also hasn’t made the Sweet 16 the past two seasons. In 2015, Kansas lost Wichita State, a program in their own state they refuse to schedule during the regular season.

3. North Carolina

6 Sweet 16’s: 2015, 2012, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2007

I thought North Carolina would be lower on this list, as Roy Williams has had some subpar teams in recent memory. North Carolina didn’t make the tournament in 2010, and they didn’t make the Sweet 16 in 2013 and 2014. However, they still have 6 appearances over the last 10 years and squeak ahead of Kansas with their Sweet 16 appearance in 2015.

2. Louisville

6 Sweet 16’s: 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2009, 2008

Rick Pitino has the Louisville program in great shape, as they almost always feature a top 10 defense by adjusted points per possession. However, their offense has been the problem in 2015. If they can find enough offense in the soft East Region this year, they could make another Final Four appearance.

1. Michigan State

7 Sweet 16’s: 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2010, 2009, 2008

Tom Izzo’s teams continue to perform well in March. In 2015, Michigan State beat Virginia to make the Sweet 16 for the 7th time over the last 10 years, tops in the country. I doubt Michigan State would have the highest rating averaged over the past 10 seasons, but they continue to have success in the tournament.

How did Amy Nelson’s bracket do in the SB Nation pool?

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When the field for the NCAA tournament was announced this year, The Power Rank unveiled its interactive bracket. The bracket exemplifies our mission in sports analytics. At its core, the bracket shows the 416 win probabilities for each team in each game. Will your team win? This is our answer. Moreover, the bracket displayed the tournament structure in an elegant, symmetric tree structure that could only come from the mind of graphic designer, Angi Chau, that doesn’t follow sports. Hover over the nodes to get win probabilities for a game. Hover over team names to get the probabilities for advancing to each round.

Fortunately, sports fans also seem to like advanced analytics and data visualization. The bracket spread rapidly through social media, and I soon got a call from Amy Nelson at SB Nation. She just launched Full Nelson, a series of weekly sports documentaries, and wanted to do one on our March Madness analytics. Of course, we were thrilled. She asked me to fill out a bracket for her pool based on our numbers.

How Amy’s bracket was picked. Winning a NCAA tournament pool goes far beyond the probabilities in our interactive bracket. Consider a bracket in which the higher ranked team in The Power Rank won each game. This year, our numbers had Kentucky as the highest ranked team. A bracket with Kentucky as champion would fare well in the pool but not win. People like Grandma Feng, who doesn’t know that a basketball is round, also picked Kentucky to win but also had Ohio and North Carolina State making the Sweet Sixteen. She wins the pool based on shear luck. The larger the number of entrants in a pool, the more likely someone makes some startling picks that win the pool.

In a big pool, one needs to look for undervalued teams. The Power Rank gave Ohio State almost a 12% chance to win the tourney, the second highest likelihood after Kentucky. If you pick Ohio State and they actually win, your bracket picks up 63 points (1 for the first round, 2 for the second round, all the way up to 32 for winning the championship game). More importantly, it’s unlikely that many other people picked Ohio State as the champion. On Yahoo, only 4.5% of brackets did this. In a pool with 100 entrants, 4 people will pick Ohio State on average. Your bracket only has to do better that 4 other people in the early rounds.

For more details about picking an optimal bracket, see this excellent article by Galen Hall. I used these concepts to pick Ohio State for Amy, a scene that shows up in the documentary (see below). However, picking the bracket in general was a frustrating experience. Ideally, one should put some math behind these concepts and optimally pick a bracket based on pool size. For example, an optimal bracket probably would not have Michigan State in the Elite Eight, simply because of the four other top 20 teams (Memphis, Saint Louis, New Mexico and Louisville) in that part of the bracket. But this additional analytics will have to wait until next year.

The roller coaster ride of following a bracket. Amy’s bracket did pretty poorly after the first weekend. For example, it had Kentucky, Wichita State, UNLV and Duke in the Sweet Sixteen from the South region. Only one team, Kentucky, made it that far. When we shot the final scenes for the documentary, we knew the bracket was suffering. I even mention that we didn’t pick the bracket to win the first weekend. A week later, the bracket surged, sporting 3 (Kentucky, Ohio State and Kansas) Final Four teams. Amy would pick up another 64 points, the total points available in the first two rounds, if Ohio State beat Kentucky in the national championship game. With the only bracket with Ohio State as champion, she would easily win the SB Nation pool. However, this scenario had only a 18% chance based on our numbers. Even after picking 3 Final Four teams, the odds of winning a competitive bracket are still rather small.

In the semifinal game in New Orleans, Ohio State faced off against Kansas. While the Jayhawks were down most of the game, their defense took Ohio State out of their half court offense. Kansas coach Bill Self might be the next Coach K, a leader that can motivate his players to a higher intensity level. A late game surge, capped with an off balanced layup that 6′ Elijah Johnson somehow got over 6’8″ Jared Sullinger with a minute to go, sealed the victory for Kansas. Amy wasn’t winning the pool with this bracket. She finished 10th out of 23 people. However, picking Ohio State was still the best strategy for this pool with 23 participants. Had she picked Kentucky over Ohio State in the championship game, she would have finished 4th at best. The top seven brackets all had Kentucky as the winner, and the winning bracket had Ohio and North Carolina State in the Sweet Sixteen. Go Grandma.

Why March Madness is like counting cards. But does that mean The Power Rank is worthless? No. Using our win probabilities, or maybe even those of Ken Pomeroy or Nate Silver, gives you an edge against the competition. It’s like counting cards in black jack. In the long run, people like Jeff Ma made a lot of money in Vegas based on a small edge against the dealer. Does that mean he won every hand? No. Did he win every time he doubled down on 11 against a 6 up card from the dealer? As he details in his book The House Advantage, no. You’re not going to win every March Madness pool using The Power Rank. And for those that believe in the power of numbers in the long run, the NCAA tournament is particularly frustrating since the opportunity arises once a year. But do you want to be Jeff Ma and have a movie made about you? Or do you want to be the person who keeps hitting on 17 expecting that 4?

Check out the Full Nelson episode on The Power Rank.

For more content, follow The Power Rank on Twitter.

Related Posts:

—About The Power Rank.
—Interactive bracket for NCAA Tournament.
—College basketball rankings.

How is The Power Rank bracket for Amy Nelson doing? A Final Four preview

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After the first weekend of the tournament, the bracket I filled out for Amy Nelson wasn’t doing so hot. For example, I had Kentucky, Wichita State, UNLV and Duke in the Sweet Sixteen of the South region. Only one team survived the first round. We were all fully aware of this the last day we shot for the Full Nelson episode on The Power Rank. In the video, I even say we didn’t pick the bracket to win the first two rounds.

How things change in a week. The top teams in The Power Rank played up to form through the second week of the tourney, capped by Ohio State’s win over Syracuse, an overrated one seed. Overall, Amy’s bracket got 3 Final Four teams (Kentucky, Ohio State and Kansas). Luck certainly played a part in this result, as the injury to North Carolina point guard Kendall Marshall made life easier on Kansas. But we’ll take it. Rumor has it that Amy’s bracket is still hanging around in the SBNation pool despite the rough first week. It would certainly benefit from an Ohio State win over Kentucky in the championship game. How likely is that?

1. Ohio State versus Kansas. (0.84)
Ohio State (2) will beat Kansas (5) by 2.1 at a neutral site. Kansas has a 43% chance of beating Ohio State.

Ohio State is a high IQ basketball team, as their passing consistently got the ball into the lane against Syracuse’s zone. Kansas is a basketball team that relies on their abundance of talent. Tyshawn Taylor exemplifies this trait, as he traded ill advised shot for unbelievable shot the entire second half against North Carolina. Ohio State’s Aaron Craft is a defensive star that will make Taylor’s life difficult in the Final Four. This game also features over 500 pounds of mass banging in the paint, as Ohio State’s Jared Sullinger will face Kansas’s Thomas Robinson. Sullinger has a better supporting cast, tipping the odds to a 57% chance that Ohio State makes the championship game.

2. Kentucky versus Louisville. (0.71)
Kentucky (1) will beat Louisville (8) by 6.3 at a neutral site. Louisville has a 30% chance of beating Kentucky.

This week, a Kentucky and Louisville fan got into a fight over this game at a dialysis center. That’s how much this game means to the people of the state. Kentucky, our highest ranked team this year, relies less on the 3 point shot than last year, a trait that makes this team more consistent on offense. Louisville is first in adjusted defense in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings. This is surprising since Rick Pitino isn’t known as a defensive coach. In fact, Louisville has been a top 10 defensive team in 5 out of the 10 years that Pitino has coached. If the defense can slow down Kentucky like they did earlier this year and the Cardinals can actually hit some shots, they have a chance to pull off the upset.

Championship Odds

1. Kentucky, 40.7%
2. Ohio State, 28.7%
3. Kansas, 18.8%
4. Louisville, 11.7%

Kentucky has the highest likelihood of winning it all. However, I picked Ohio State in Amy’s bracket because the Buckeyes are wildly undervalued in the eyes of the public. Only 4.5% of brackets at Yahoo had Ohio State as the champ. Our numbers give a 18% chance that Ohio State beats Kentucky in the championship game.

For more content, follow The Power Rank on Twitter.

Related Posts:

—The Power Rank featured on Full Nelson, a SB Nation documentary.
—Interactive bracket for NCAA Tournament.
—College basketball rankings.

Predictions for 2nd Round of 2011 NCAA Tournament

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Here are the predicted outcomes for this weekend’s games. The only upset is Washington over North Carolina by a slim half point. Can the veteran Husky squad beat the young Tar Heels? Otherwise, Kansas and Pittsburgh look like the most likely 1 seed to go down this round, although they are predicted to win by 4.9 over Illinois and 6.5 over Butler respectively. Last year, Kansas looked sluggish in a first round win over Lehigh and then went down to Northern Iowa in the second round. This year, Boston University was only down 4 at the half to Kansas. As for Pittsburgh versus Butler, it won’t be a pretty game, as both teams are well known for grinding out wins defensively. Butler has not had the greatest season, and guard Shelvin Mack looks like he lost his jumper in the off season, but the Bulldogs still gutted out the win against Old Dominion on Thursday.

Richmond will beat Morehead State by 3.0

San Diego State will beat Temple by 5.5

Connecticut will beat Cincinnati by 1.9

Kentucky will beat West Virginia by 3.0

Florida will beat UCLA by 2.9

Pittsburgh will beat Butler by 6.5

Brigham Young will beat Gonzaga by 4.9

Wisconsin will beat Kansas State by 4.1

Purdue will beat VCU by 7.9

Kansas will beat Illinois by 4.9

Notre Dame will beat Florida State by 5.2

Texas will beat Arizona by 4.9

Duke will beat Michigan by 7.1

Syracuse will beat Marquette by 1.5

Ohio State will beat George Mason by 8.2

Washington will beat North Carolina by 0.5

Predictions were 16 of 29 against the line in the first round for a 55% winning percentage.