NCAA Tournament: Crunching Numbers on Power Conference Teams Making the Conference Tournament Finals

One of the rules I have developed for picking NCAA tourney games, involves NOT trusting teams in the power conference tournaments that win their conference tournaments if they are ranked OUTSIDE the top 10. I have decided to finally publish some statistics to either prove or disprove this rule and to also look at the losing team in the conference final.

I started by entering data on the big-6 conference tournaments (ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big 12, SEC, PAC-10) since 1992. I was curious as to what the effect is on playing 3, 4, or even 5 games in as many days and if that physical strain produces any kind of trend. Please note that some conferences didn't have conference tournaments until later on, and I was unable to find complete data on the Big 8 tournament from 1992-1996.

So, my unofficial data shows this:

Average wins for top 5 team (before the conference tournament) that WINS their conference tournament:
3.5 (better than Elite 8 on average; an incredible 16 out of 32 top-5 teams make the Final 4)
Average wins for top 5 team that LOSES in the final of their conference tournament:
4.1 (five Final 4s out of seven teams - I don't have much data on this occurrence)

Average wins for team ranked 6-10 (before the conference tournament) that WINS their conference tournament:
2.6 (only two Final 4s out of 21 teams)
Average wins forteam ranked 6-10 that LOSES in the final of their conference tournament:
2.3 (only ONE Final 4 out of 17 teams - it was Duke in 2004 with Luol Deng)

Average wins for team ranked 11-17 that WINS their conference tournament:
1.6 (falling short of Sweet 16 on average; only two Final 4s out of 12 teams)
Average wins for team ranked 11-17 that LOSES in the final of their conference tournament:
1.4 (falling short of Sweet 16 on average; only one Final 4 out of 14 teams - it was the 1994 Florida Gators that beat a 9-seed in the regional finals)

Average wins for team ranked 18-25 that WINS their conference tournament:
0.9 (four out of 8 failed to win a game; one made the Final 4 - it was Mississippi St in 1996 with Erick Dampier)
Average wins for team ranked 18-25 that LOSES in the final of their conference tournament:
1.1 (four out of 16 failed to win a game; no Final 4 appearances)

Average wins for unranked team that WINS their conference tournament:
0.3 (Only 2 out of 7 won a game)
Average wins for unranked team that LOSES in the final of their conference tournament:
0.8 (Only 7 out of 13 won a game, and one of them, West Virginia in 2005, made the Elite 8. Those three wins pushed the average higher, but generally, these teams don't do well either).

The only way for this data to even mean anything, is to compare this data with the average wins that a team of their seeding achieves. For example, an average 3-seed wins 1.8 games. If Missouri, a team ranked #14 entering last week, receives a 3-seed hypothetically, the data says that they are likely to underperform to some degree, since on average teams of that rank only win 1.6 games.

Here, is a listing of the average number of wins for each seeding since the Tournament had 64 teams in 1985.

Seed = Average number of wins (through 2008)
1= 3.43
2= 2.41
3= 1.82
4= 1.49
5= 1.15
6= 1.25
7= 0.88
8= 0.67
9= 0.58
10= 0.63
11= 0.49
12= 0.50
13= 0.25
14= 0.18
15= 0.04
16= 0.00