It is time again for March Madness.

The brackets for the NCAA Basketball tournament were set on Sunday and the first round of games is now over.

How upsetting was the first round of the NCAA Basketball Tournament the year?

There are two stats that I keep during the tournament each year.

UF (Upset Factor) is a number that is a sum off the seed differences when a lower seed knocks of 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.

Disclaimer: The First Four is ignored as all four games are against teams of equal seeding. There are no upsets in the First Four games. The traditional first round is now sometimes referred to as the second round. It is the first round to me.

There was one big upset this year in the first round, as for the second time a 16 seed upset a 1 seed. A 2 seed also went down to a 15 seed.

But, how upsetting was the first round overall?

Here are the numbers for the first round. You can see that there were no upsets at all in the West region. But, how do these numbers stack up to previous first rounds?

The UF is only 47 which does not even make the top 10 for first rounds.

I also keep track of how many double digit seeds make it to each round. I don’t have the years on this one, but perhaps I will make a modification to the spreadsheet so they show when I sort the data and make a clip.

This year five double digit seeds made it to the 2nd round which is not even in the top 20. At the top of this list is ten double digit seeds which came in 2016 which also had the highest UF for the first round since the tournament expanded to 64 teams.

This one is sorted by first round BP and you can see that it is tied for 9th all time.

Here is a closer look at the numbers. With a 1 and 2 out there are already 20 future BP lost. Combine this with the 7 lost in the first round and the max BP for the tournament at the moment is 165. This would still break the record of 162 in 2018, but there could only be one upset in the 2nd round. 2018 had 24 in the first round.

Now to see how the rest of the tournament plays out. Will it continue to be in the middle of the rankings?

Who will win it all? Will it be a 1 seed?

Steven