Is March Madness All Luck?
Briefly

The NCAA basketball tournament, known as March Madness, is characterized by its unpredictability, featuring 68 teams in a high-stakes knockout format. Early games revealed unexpected results despite initial continuity among higher-seeded teams. Notably, the match between twelfth-seeded McNeese State and fifth-seeded Clemson highlighted this chaos, as Clemson crumbled significantly despite past remoteness to the Final Four. Sociologist Mark Robert Rank notes that basketball has the least luck factor compared to other sports, allowing teams more scoring chances and thus a lesser dependence on chance events to determine game outcomes.
"Hockey was found to be the most luck-based...around fifty-three per cent of a team's performance...can be attributed to chance."
Read at The New Yorker
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