[Prison Bitch]

Originally Posted by KC_Connection

The more possessions there are, the more likely it also is that the superior team will exhibit their superiority. If the 2010 Kansas/Northern Iowa game was played with 70 possessions instead of Northern Iowa slowing it down to a snail's pace (61), for example, there's almost no way that upset happens and Self could quite possibly have another national championship. This is another reason why I much prefer facing teams in the tournament with quick tempos.

Myth, and disproven by a Harvard study:

On the surface, this logic makes sense; allowing the superior team fewer opportunities to score seems like a good, if risky, strategy. Luckily, we can empirically test this theory.

Using tempo data from Ken Pomeroy’s incredible website, we have analyzed every first and second round NCAA tournament game that could produce an upset from 2004 to 2009. We made the decision to exclude 1 vs 16 and 2 vs 15 matchups, since over the last decade those games have produced no upsets. That left us with a sample of 144 games to analyze.

The results were, well, stunning. There were 35 upsets in the data set, and the average tempo of those games was 67.77, while the average tempo of the games in which the underdog lost was only 64.93. Using the statistical technique of a two-sample t test, we can find that we reject the null hypothesis that there was no difference between the tempos of successful and unsuccessful underdogs, and conclude that successful NCAA tournament underdogs played at a faster tempo, using more possessions. The P-value for this test stat was 0.0134, which is well inside the threshold for significance.

https://harvardsportsanalysis.wordpr...nament-upsets/