The 2015 NCAA Basketball Tournament came to a close earlier tonight. This year was a big contrast to the tournament last year.

In a post two years ago, Most Upsetting Tournament?, I wrote about two stats that I keep during the tournament each year.

UF (Upset Factor) is a number that is a sum of the seed differences when a lower seed knocks off a team with a higher seeding. For instance, when a 15 seed knocks off a 2 seed the UF is incremented by 13. If an 9 seed knocks off a 8 seed then the UF goes up by 1. If a 10 seed beats a 15 seed, there are no UF points since the higher seed was the winner.

BP (Bracket Points) is probably familiar to most sports fans. When scoring your bracket you get 1 point for a first round win, 2 points for the second round and then 4, 8, 16 and 32 for the following rounds. Basically, you fill out the bracket with the higher seeded team winning each game. You then add up the points based on the tourney results. For the Final Four, the points are given when a #1 seed wins.

Last year I followed the tournament round by round. However, this year I was traveling during the first two weekends of the tournament so decided to only write one post at the end of the tournament.

How Upsetting?

How Upsetting? II

How Upsetting? III

How Upsetting? IV

How Upsetting? V

Last year was the most upsetting tournament since the tournament expanded to 64 teams, this year it was one of the least upsetting.

The 111 UF points last year was the highest of all time and the 68 BP points was one of the lowest.

So what were the final numbers for this year? We can assume that the BP points would be high as three number one seeds made it to the Final Four.

There were five double digit seeds that won in the first round, but only one of those won in the second round. That kept the UF points low.

The final BP for this year was 153 and the UF was only 61. A big contrast from the tournament last year.

Some may argue that Kentucky losing in the semi-final round was a big upset, but Wisconsin was also a number one seed so there are no UF points given. I was not surprised that Wisconsin won, Kentucky showed that they were vulnerable in the game against Notre Dame.

So where does this year stack up against the least upsetting tournaments?

This year tied for fourth in the UF category. The tournament in 2007 was by far the least upsetting as only two double digit seeded teams (Winthrop and VCU) made it to the second round and it ended up with a UF of only 26.

When sorted by BP this year was also number four. There is a potential total of 192 BP so this year was 39 BP short of perfect. In 2008 all four number one seeds made it to the Final Four and the final BP was 164.

Would you want to see a tournament that had a perfect bracket? I think it would be a lot less exciting.

There is some excitement seeing the top seeds play each other in the final, but it is also fun to see upsets along the way.

Now for some Baseball!

Play Ball!!

Steven