Conference Tournaments, Fatigue or Momentum?

Many coaches don't particularly like the idea of conference tournaments. After going through a grueling conference schedule you are expected to play up to 4 days in a row before the biggest and most important tournament of the year. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially because you have already played the teams in your conference at least once. Regardless, this week of conference tournaments influences the committee and becomes very important to how we view teams. Tournament births, seeding and regional sites are all at stake up until 2 hours before the bracket is released. 

Obviously the goal is to win every game you are in, but do some coaches take it more seriously than others? Would they prefer their team get rest instead of playing 3 tough games in 3 days? Rick Bozich recently wrote an article on how past NCAA champions and final four contenders have fared in their conference tournaments. He found half of the teams that made it to the final four since 2003 have won their conference tournaments. It got me thinking are these teams riding the momentum wave into March Madness or is just a self-fulfilling prophecy because they are the best teams and thus went farther in both Tournaments. This post will discuss whether we can find any correlation between playing on the last day of your conference tournament and how it improves or hurts your ultimate run to the final 4.

Assumptions

I went and looked back at all of the conference tournament winners and runner ups since 2000 in the big 6 conferences. In total it was 152 teams over a 13 year period, a solid sample size. Then I compared a teams seed to the expected wins a team of that seed normally gets. Essentially I am looking at if a team made it to the last day of their conference tournament, how is their performance compared to the average of a team with a similar seed. Below is a chart of the average wins per tournament seed.

This is actually a really good tool to use when making your brackets in general. As you can see the biggest separation is between the 1 and 2 seeds. A 1 seed on average advances a whole game further than a 2 seed. Other interesting notes are you would rather be a 10 seed than a 9 seed historically. Lastly, the glaring .000 expected wins for the 16 seed because they have never won a game. 

Also lets think about the implication of getting to the finals of your conference tournament. You are in most cases improving your seed. So even if there is no indication of fatigue or momentum, it is advantageous for teams to go as far as possible in their conference tournament (because the better the seed, the more wins you get on average).

Results

Here is a a look at one of the conference tables I set up to give you an idea of how i was looking at the data.

The above table is a list of the winners and runner ups of the Big East Tournament over the past 13 seasons. Next to the teams are their seed in the NCAA tournament, how many wins they had, how many wins that seed normally has and lastly did they over/under perform the expectation. The winners of the Big East have had a great run of late with both the 2012 Louisville and 2011 Uconn advancing to the final four. Overall the Big East winners outperformed the expected wins by 7.75 games, divide that by 13 and you get .6 wins above average per year. This is pretty significant but was skewed by the last two year results. Now if you look over at the runner ups portion, you can see on average they under performed compared to their seed by -.17 games per year. 

I won't bore you with the rest of the conference tables. If you want to take a look at them individually, follow this link. They are set up in the same format. 

After evaluating all 152 teams I found if you won your conference tournament you out performed your seed by an average of .05 games. Also, if you lost your conference tournament you under performed by -.03 games. Thus, there seems to be no fatigue factor at all and also no real momentum gain heading in to the field of 68. As I mentioned above, if there is no significant advantage or disadvantage to advancing to the last day of your teams respective conference tournament, they should try to improve their seed as much as possible. As my idol Johnny Tsunami once said, "Go big or go home". 

More in depth tournament match ups will be posted once the bracket is released tonight. Thanks to the people who actually got this far in the post as well.