One Fish, Two Fish, Stat Fish, Jew Fish

Why Cindarellas are Bad

From a literary perspective, I’m sure they’re wonderful. But every time a legitimately underseeded team wins a few games, one of two things has happened:

1) The team has become, for the tournament, a much much much better team than they ever were in the rest of the season
2) The team has merely benefited from the variations in performance that allow upsets to happen

If it’s the first, well then the Cindarella has a legitimate place in the coda of the tournament. If you suddenly go from the #25 team in the nation to a top 10 team, well good on you. The problem is, there’s really no reason to assume this is the case. Why would a team suddenly become wonderful, where they hadn’t been? Why are they hitting more 2s, playing better perimeter defense, getting more boards… Sure, clutch, blah blah, but there’s no reasons that the other teams aren’t responding to pressure the same way. Possible, but it falls into the inevitable category of ‘if this pattern could be produced legitimately by randomness, it’s probably more accurate to assume that its origin is random rather than try to apply some logical reason to it.’

Which brings me to the second, that it’s just a fluke. As long as you’re in the same ballpark as the better team, you should win some (Arizona has 30% against Louisville, Michigan St. has 40%). In the initial 32 games, there are probably 16-20 that have the weaker team having at least a 30% chance of winning. Which really means that 5-6 of those games should have the weaker (presumably underseeded) team winning. And in the next round, that means that 1-2 of those should win their games against better teams. Which means that it’s actually a statistical truth (albeit a shoddily done one) that, in general, there will be 1-2 teams in the Sweet 16 that are there, not because they were the best teams, but because they pulled off random upsets. And of course, there’s a chance again of one of those teams making the elite eight (not a high one if they’re Cleveland State, a much higher one if it’s Arizona.)

In short, there’s no reason to assume that a ‘cindarella’ team is actually good now, and not just ‘lucky.’ Of course, this isn’t luck per se - when David Ortiz hits 2 home runs in a game, that’s not ‘luck’, that’s skill. But, of course, he doesn’t do it every game. Some games he’ll hit two homers, some games he’ll get no hits at all. It would be accurate to say that the overall results are not luck, but the random variation/distribution in his small-sampled performances is. Villanova may be a #15 team, and that’s not luck. But some games they will play like a #30 team, and some games they’ll play like a #2 team (to average about #15), and that distribution is random, not preordained.

But anyhow, why Cindarellas are bad. Mostly, because they create stupidly easy matchups for much better teams later on. Louisville got to play Arizona (39 point win) instead of Wake Forest, last year Kansas got both Nova (15 point win) (instead of Vandy or Clemson) and then Davidson (instead of Wisconsin/Georgetown). George Mason made a very impressive run, (which itself included a game against Wichita St. instead of Tennessee), but it gave 3 seed Florida a 15 point free pass into the championship game.

Cindarellas are a natural consequence of every tournament. They make things interesting. But practically, in general, they are buoyed by fortunate circumstance, and eventually they are not fortunate, and then they get blown away by a much better team. Which is boring.