The New Yorker:

As a Purdue Boilermakers fan, I’ve experienced plenty of heartbreak during the N.C.A.A. tournament. Was it a matter of skill, or of chance?

By Tyler Foggatt

The beauty of March Madness is that anything can happen. The horror of March Madness is that, really, anything can happen. Unlike the college-football playoffs—which are highly restrictive, and weighted toward bigger schools from powerhouse conferences—the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament features sixty-eight teams, playing in a sudden-death format. This produces as much good basketball as it does weird basketball. Although this year’s tournament initially seemed short on upsets—in each region, the Top Four seeds all advanced to the second round—there were some mind-boggling early games, such as the victory of twelfth-seeded McNeese State over fifth-seeded Clemson. The final score, 69–67, does not properly reflect the extent of Clemson’s collapse: the team scored just thirteen points in the first half of the game. As the New York Post later wrote, of a team that nearly made it to the Final Four last year, “Clemson went from Elite Eight to Unlucky 13.”

Mark Robert Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “The Random Factor,” who has written about the role of chance in sports, said that, according to a 2012 study estimating the contribution of luck to a team’s over-all season, basketball is actually the sport in which luck plays the smallest role, as opposed to football, hockey, baseball, and soccer. (Hockey was found to be the most luck-based; the study estimated that around fifty-three per cent of a team’s performance in an N.H.L. season can be attributed to chance.) In basketball, Rank explained, there are plenty of opportunities for each team to score, making it less likely that one freak play will ultimately determine the outcome of a game. Whereas in hockey or soccer, a team may only be shooting and scoring once or twice, creating a situation in which teams are more likely to lose because of something beyond their control, like a bad bounce.

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