What US college basketball can teach us about “survivorship bias”
| Mar 28th, 2010 | Filed under: Academic Research, Performance, Analytics & Metrics, Today's Post | By: Alpha Male |
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Winning a sports tournament is always a major accomplishment. But it’s perhaps even more of an accomplishment when the entire tournament is a giant elimination round. Some tournaments, such as the Olympic hockey tournament or the World Cup of soccer/football allow teams to log a loss or two in round-robin play. But others, like Wimbledon or the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship require teams to maintain totally perfect records in order to advance.
As a result, the four remaining teams in US college basketball’s “March Madness” all have records of 4-0. Does this mean that the average tournament team has a perfect record? Of course not. Sixty teams have less than perfect records but did not actually survive to this point in the tournament to be counted (actually 61 if you count the “play-in” game where the 64th and 65th seeded team fight it out for a change to get shellacked by a #1 seed). The difference between the perfect records of today’s survivors and the average records of all teams knocked out so far amounts to a “survivorship bias.” More…
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