Going the Distance

Every year in March, college basketball fans anxiously wait to see if their team made the NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship tournament. The tournament is a three week-long single-elimination tournament in which 64 teams compete to take home the highly coveted National Championship title. The fun isn’t just reserved for fans - countless people from all across the globe fill out tournament brackets and bet on which teams will make deep runs and ultimately win it all.

While coaches, teams, and fans alike want to see their preferred team effortlessly stroll through each round to play in the National Championship game, they first have to survive the first weekend of the tournament. The first and second rounds of the tournament (Round of 64 and Round of 32, respectively) are historically filled with the most chaos, with underdog teams defying odds by knocking out highly favored teams early on. Because of the precedence for upsets in the first round of the tournament, there is a lot of focus on the matchups and locations for each competing team.

Tournament brackets does more than just determine who gets into the tournament - they also determine where the chosen teams play, who they play against, and how highly they are ranked.

Each team is listed from best to worst with an overall rank, a number 1 to 64*, in which 1 represents the overall best team in the tournament and 64 represents the worst. These rankings are then grouped into 16 seeds of four teams each, wherein 1 seeds are the best teams and 16 seeds are the worst teams. Many considerations go into the creation of tournament brackets, but the idea is that higher seeds are rewarded for their regular season performance by playing against the lowest ranked teams. Additionally, top-ranked teams are not to be placed in a home-crowd disadvantage.

Because the tournament is single-elimination, teams only have one shot in each round to advance to the next level. All teams put their best foot forward, but there's no room for an off game - one bad night can (and has) cost the best team in the nation a shot at the national title. Many lower ranked teams don't make it into the tournament very often and have the tenacity to try to become the next Cinderella story.

Teams want every advantage at their disposal when going into the tournament, and having a closer first-round site can be incredibly beneficial both physically and psychologically.

• Student athletes still officially attend classes during the tournament, so shorter travel times are logistically easier; not only that, but traveling long distances via bus or air can be physically draining.
• Games are played from early morning to late at night across multiple time zones, so it's also ideal to play in or near your home time zone.
• Perhaps most importantly, playing near your school allows your fanbase to easily travel to the games, simulating as much of a home court advantage as possible. When the tides turn against a team in a game, nothing fires them up like a raucous home crowd.

In the NCAA's "How the field of 68 teams is picked for March Madness" rules*, it states:

'To recognize the demonstrated quality of such teams, the committee shall not place teams seeded on the first four lines at a potential “home-crowd disadvantage” in the first round.'

While this mention of a home-crowd disadvantage is vague and there are many other rules that go into tournament seeding, fans generally interpret this statement to mean that top seeded teams receive geographic preference in accordance with their rank.

This project analyzes first-round site location distances to see if higher ranked teams receive better geographic preference during the national championship tournament.

Making apples-to-apples comparisons amongst schools based on their mean travel distance is not optimal - travel distances are expected to fluctuate based on the frequency of appearances of each seed in a school's history.

In other word, comparing a school with five appearances as a 1 seed against a school with five appearances as a 4 seed would not make sense with raw values - you would expect the school with more 1 seed appearances to have a much lower average travel distance. Applying weights to these values helps to normalize them for more accurate comparisons.

Weights are applied based on seed values.
The weights are derived from the overall seed averages. Based on data from 1985 to 2019, 2 seeds travel ~1.3 times farther than 1 seeds (353/482 = 0.73), 3 seeds travel nearly double the distance of 1 seeds (353/689 = 0.51), and 4 seeds travel ~2.3 times farther than 1 seeds (353/829 = 0.43).

In the NCAA's "How the field of 68 teams is picked for March Madness" rules*, it states:

'To recognize the demonstrated quality of such teams, the committee shall not place teams seeded on the first four lines at a potential “home-crowd disadvantage” in the first round.'

While this mention of a home-crowd disadvantage is vague and there are many other rules that go into tournament seeding, fans generally interpret this statement to mean that top seeded teams receive geographic preference in accordance with their rank.

This project analyzes first-round site location distances to see if higher ranked teams receive better geographic preference during the national championship tournament.