Every March, millions of Americans dive into brackets, search for Cinderella stories, and brace for the chaos of the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. Affectionately known as “March Madness,” buzzer-beaters, bracket-busters, and No. 15 seeds knocking off Blue Bloods are the heart and soul of the spectacle.
But, let’s take a timeout.
Is March really that mad? Or is its fabled mania no more than a myth? To find out, the Independent turned to the numbers, running head-to-head comparisons between college basketball’s big dance, the NFL playoffs, and the NBA postseason to compare how seeding predicts outcomes in each tournament.
We started by scraping playoff results from 2005–2024 from Sports Reference, building regression models to test how much a team’s seed predicts whether they win. The logic is simple: if March Madness is truly unpredictable, then seeding shouldn’t matter much. If the NBA and NFL are more orderly, then seeding should be a stronger predictor of success. Here’s what we found.
In the NCAA Tournament, seeding matters—a lot. According to our weighted regression of seed win percentage and seed number, each step down the seed ladder (e.g., from a 1-seed to a 2-seed) reduces a team’s chance of winning by 4.3 percentage points. That’s a huge effect—larger than in the NFL and NBA. And this isn’t just statistical noise: the p-value for this effect was a microscopic 4.765e-09, meaning there’s essentially zero chance this pattern is due to randomness. March Madness may feel wild, but on the whole, it’s a tournament where David won’t be taking down Goliath.
Contrast this with the NFL, where seeding does almost nothing to predict who wins. Our regression shows that a drop of one seed only decreases a team’s odds by 0.37 percentage points—a negligible effect with a p-value of 0.8665. The catchphrase “Any Given Sunday” thus rings true: the NFL postseason is full of upsets, with wild card teams frequently making deep runs and Super Bowls often decided by razor-thin margins.
The NBA strikes a balance between these two extremes. Here, each seed drop lowered win probability by 5.6 percentage points, a figure both larger than the NCAA’s coefficient and statistically significant (p = 0.02). But this makes sense: the NBA’s best-of-seven format gives more room for talent to rise to the top. There are fewer upsets when teams have to win four times to advance.
Contrast that with the volatility of March Madness, where one hot shooting night or off-game can change everything. As Fairleigh Dickinson head coach Tobin Anderson famously said after his No. 16-seed squad stunned top-seeded Purdue in 2023: “If we played them 100 times, they’d probably beat us 99 times… But tonight’s the one we had to be unique, we had to be unorthodox. We had to make it tough on them, just be different.” If that matchup had been a seven-game series, the Boilermakers would almost certainly have won in five.
To account for the series format, we also examined how seeding affects win percentage in the playoffs. For every seed a favorite fell, their in-series win percentage dropped by 4.5 percentage points (p = 0.0007)—nearly identical to the 4.3 percentage point drop we found in the NCAA Tournament.
But perhaps we’re thinking about madness all wrong—what if we look at the sports betting market instead? Here, March comes out on top. More money is wagered during March than in any other month outside the NFL regular season, including during the NFL and NBA playoffs. In other words, the “madness” might not come from the outcomes—it comes from the obsession, the belief that anything can happen, the way entire workplaces grind to a halt on a Thursday afternoon to stream a 13-seed knocking off a powerhouse.
So, while the Big Dance is chaotic in spirit, it is orderly in structure. Yes, brackets get busted and underdogs rise, but with 63 games played during the tournament, this is inevitable. Top seeds still perform like top seeds, which means winning most of the time—just not all the time. As Fairleigh Dickinson reminded us last year, you only need to win once.
And that once is madness enough.
Jonah Karafiol ’26 (jonahkarafiol@college.harvard.edu) is the Managing Editor of the Independent.