NCAA Tournament Seed and Probability of Advancing

My Cal Poly Mustangs made it to the tournament for the first time this year. As a 16 seed, they are definitely a dark horse, so to speak. I wanted to see how much seed correlates with advancement through the tournament. Seeding is also important when filling out brackets - it is likely the only relevant data that a person has on a team. This information was not readily available so I compiled it from a few sources and built the following visualizations to illustrate it. Data is from 1985(first year of the 64 team tournament) to 2011.

Some interesting points and quick analysis:

• A 16 seed has never been past the first round (by beating a 1 seed)
• The lowest seed to make it to the sweet sixteen is a 15 seed
• The lowest seed to make it to the elite eight is a 12 seed
• Three 11 seeds have made it to the final four (2011 VCU, 2006 George Mason, 1986 LSU)
• Nearly 60% of tournament winners are 1 seeds

% of Teams Remaining in Each Round by Seed

Mouseover points or lines to expose values.

Makeup of Teams in Each Round by Seed

Data collected from sports-reference.com, ncaa.com and Wikipedia.