2025 NCAA March Madness Statistical Breakdown

Today we are going to be breaking down some of our predictions for March Madness. A combination of historical stats, matchup results, and ESPN’s BPI (or basketball power index) were included in this analysis.

In future years, we intend to include additional statistics such as:

• The age and experience of players: does a team with a large portion of returning players outperform a team with all freshmen or ‘One-and-done’ players. Think of Duke or UConn as an example of a team which typically has a fresh set of players year over year.
• Coaching Experience: How does the importance of coach pedigree play into the success of a team? Does a once successful coach moving to another school limit this factor? Coach John Calipari of Arkansas will be an interesting coach to watch as this is his first season removed from Kentucky.
• Regional and Crowd Effects: How important is the factors of travel distance and fans who cheer for their team impact a team. Can a team achieve ‘home field advantage’ on a neutral court?
• Loss differential of high ranked teams: Consider a team like the University of North Carolina (UNC) which has competed in fourteen games against top 50 ranked teams, only winning three of such games. They have been inconsistent and could make a serious run due to the high level of difficulty schedule UNC played against. Notable losses include Duke (by 17, 13, and 3 points), Florida (by 6 points), Auburn (by 7 points), and Kansas (3 points). Because of this, UNC could be poised to be a dark horse in this year’s tournament.

Model Creation

Our Model utilized seventeen factors to predict an unbiased ‘Power Ranking’ of all teams in the 2025 NCAA March Madness Tournament. All data was standardized and normalized to ensure consistency and reduce the effect of potential outlier biases such as teams with one win and zero losses against top 50 ranked teams.