Tournament Index: March Madness 2023 predictions, Cinderella projections

Draw Difficulty

Current Ratings	Historical Team Ratings
Upset Alerts	Cinderella Watch
Dark Horses	Draw Difficulty

Although the selection committee intends to assemble a tournament field that’s as balanced as possible, some teams still get the short end of the stick, or, in some cases, favorable draws as well.

Tournament Index takes this into consideration with its Draw Difficulty rating. Based on every team’s Path Rating — a metric that measures the difficulty of a team’s future tournament matchups, based on matchup probability — we are able to measure the difficulty of every team’s tournament draw based on that of the same tournament seed.

Here’s how it works: The average Path Rating for a No. 1 seed is 66.1, with a standard deviation of 1.3. A team receives a “Tough Draw” label when its Path Rating is one standard deviation above that of the seed’s average Path Rating difficulty, which, in this case, would be 67.4 or higher for a No. 1 seed. Teams with one a Path Rating one standard deviation below the seed average receives an “Easy Draw” label.

The results are telling. On average, teams with “Easy Draw” labels average nearly twice as many tournament victories as those with “Tough Draw” labels at 1.25 wins to 0.66 wins. No. 1 seeds average 3.90 wins when they receive “Easy Draws” compared to 2.11 wins with “Tough Draws.”

The full list of average wins based on seed and tournament difficulty is below.

Average wins by tournament draw difficulty

Seed	Easy Draw	Moderate Draw	Tough Draw
1	3.90	3.47	2.11
2	2.67	2.15	1.55
3	1.73	2.17	1.46
4	2.27	1.75	1.00
5	0.88	1.20	0.50
6	0.77	0.85	0.30
7	1.55	0.89	0.86
8	1.00	0.88	0.38
9	0.93	0.40	0.64
10	0.92	0.40	0.33
11	1.91	0.57	0.64
12	0.46	1.10	0.15
13	0.33	0.10	0.21
14	0.18	0.18	0.13
15	0.33	0.00	0.25
16	0.14	0.00	0.00
Average	1.25	1.01	0.66