2025-10-29

Background

  • NCAA Basketball is a nationally recognized brand
  • Provides a unique opportunity for student-athletes from 364 schools to compete
  • Varying financial and brand support between schools
  • The Question: How strong is the correlation between increased spending and increased success?

Strategy

  • In the era of NIL, the sport has changed significantly
  • We are only using data from 2014-2022 for training and early analysis (2023 is for testing)
  • On-court success metrics are from Kaggle, and measure wins, losses, and advanced metrics
  • Financial information is from DoE’s EADA
  • They collect information on college athletics at every level and in every sport

Data Cleaning!!

  • Lots of work done here
  • Raw data: Kaggle set was nicely formatted, but DoE data was split into different sheets by year
  • Additionally, most of the 364 D1 schools had different names in Kaggle and DoE datasets…
  • This was a headache, but thankfully I realized I can feed both lists to ChatGPT and it matches perfectly!!
  • Used the ChatGPT mappings to do a left join, and created a few helper columns for the graphs to come.
  • Many different variables (total wins, conference, postseason success, etc.)
  • Also added a helper to determine which tier they fall into (high/mid/low)

Exploratory Analysis

  • So, so many questions I wanted to answer!
  • Only including about 5 of them here, the rest are in the .R file.

Question 1

  • Let’s do a plot of increased spending against on-court success:

Question 2

  • Let’s break it down by conference “tier”.
  • First, what exactly do we mean by conference tiers?
  • High-major: Big name schools, winning national championships, names someone who doesn’t follow basketball would know. The cream of the crop.
  • Mid-major: Still competitive, but not as well-known or flashy as high-major. Sometimes see success in March Madness.
  • Low-major: Not well-funded, not very successful. Usually smaller schools with less resources to dedicate to developing their athletic programs.

High-major Spending vs. Success

High Major Analysis

  • High-major programs have more scattered success. At this level, it’s more of an emphasis on coaching and player skill than simply having more resources (law of dimishing returns)
  • For example, Louisville and Georgetown both went through periods with awful coaches, and even extremely high spending couldn’t save them
  • Say hi to ASU! We are below average in both men’s basketball spending and performance :(

Mid-Major “Madness”

Mid-Major Points of Interest

  • Big winners and big spenders! So called “mid-major giants” terrorize smaller programs when they would be able to hold their own in a high-major conference.
  • Plenty of schools who do not spend heavily. Many of these colleges do not have the necessary resources to compete, such as Central Arkansas and Lamar.

Low-major

Low-Major Observations

  • Much more even in terms of spending. Schools at these tiers generally don’t have the resources to even think about making a name for themselves.
  • The correlation seems strongest here because a slight boost in spending can be a huge percentage chunk of another school’s budget.
  • Here is where every dollar counts!

March Madness

  • Every team wants to have the chance to play for the national championship
  • The NCAA Tournament presents that opportunity every March, with 68/364 teams participating annually.
  • Do more successful teams here have more financial backing?

Graph it!

What trends can we read from March performance?

Testing our model

  • Let’s actually test our linear regression model that has been trained on over 1,200 datapoints.
  • We will ask it to predict total wins from the 2023-24 season (not included in dataset) based on total spending and which “conference tier” they are in.

Full picture

High Major Graph

Mid Major Graph

Low Major Graph

Final Observations

  • Ultimately, there does seem to be a relationship between program spending and overall success in NCAA D1 men’s basketball.
  • However, this correlation is not as strong as one may suspect
  • This randomness is part of what draws millions to fill March Madness brackets each year, no one every truly knows how it will play out
  • Coaching, student/fanbase support, and countless other factors all play a role in determining how successful a program will be.
  • However, financial support from the university is certainly an important step in building a winning team.