Improving the Big East Conference Basketball Tournament

Abstract

The Big East Conference basketball tournament is a four-day, 10-team, knockout tournament that is used to decide which team receives the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA basketball tournament. Through data-based modeling, we show that the current tournament format is not very effective in determining the true best team. Specifically, by considering a variety of alternate formats, we find that certain formats that exclude all but a handful of teams substantially outperform the current format in determining the true best team. We also find that among formats that involve all ten teams, a format in which the top two seeds each receive two byes is relatively effective. We show that our conclusions are robust to several key modeling choices. We also investigate the effectiveness of the tie-breaking scheme used by the Big East Conference, finding that it is little better than random and may even favor weaker teams.