Ranking the most difficult championship runs

Who had the most difficult path to a championship? It’s the subject of endless debate. But here, we don’t embrace debate, we end it.

It turns out we can pretty easily quantify this. I’m going to borrow a method I first saw Jeff Sackmann use. It’s simple and useful and the right way to do this. It uses the following steps:

1. Find the average strength of a national champion

2. Find the chance a team of that strength beats each opponent on its championship run using opponent strength on the day of the game

3. Take the product of those chances

Follow those steps and you’ll get the probability that an average national champion would have beaten the six teams on its slate.

So let’s use that method and rank all of the champs since ‘97 in terms of the most-difficult path to a championship:

Well, there you go. Nobody can argue with that list, right? Here’s what Baylor’s run in ‘21 looked like, in which the average champ would have had a 3.3% chance of conquering:

And here’s what Kansas’s run in ‘22 looked like, a 20.6% chance for the average champ:

The percentages might seem low here, what with no team having more than a 21% chance of success. But to put every champ on equal footing (the only proper way to do this) we’re using the average strength of a champion for each team’s rating. That works out to 28.85, or something like the third- or fourth-best team in a typical season. And a team in that range typically has a 8-9% chance of winning the tournament given normal bracket luck.

But regardless of how good a champion was, the percentages are always against each of them. Even with the easiest path, each champion must either over-perform or have their opponents under-perform for them to win a title. Almost surely, both, if we could somehow measure it.

We don’t have to stop here. We can apply the same method to Final Four teams. Take a gander at the 10 most difficult paths:

Here’s what VCU’s run looked like:

VCU - along with ‘21 UCLA - had an additional game which adds a extra degree of difficulty to their run. It makes Texas Tech’s second-most difficult run look quite impressive, considering it was the standard four games. The Red Raiders would have blown away all known records for championship difficulty had they beaten Virginia in the ‘19 final.

Here are the ten least-difficult Final Four paths:

We’ve already seen what ‘22 Kansas faced, so let’s look at ‘97 UNC:

The Heels allowed an 11-18 Fairfield team to score over 1.25 points per possession on them (and actually trailed by 7 at the half) and still made the Final Four. Good times.

And if you must know, the easiest path to the Sweet 16 belongs to ‘99 UConn:

Things would get more difficult for them as they would conclude the tournament by beating possibly the best non-champion in the history of the tournament. The Huskies would finish with the third-hardest path of any champion.

That’s why this method is superior to taking the average rating, or worse, average ranking of a team’s opponents. It will properly weight the tougher games on a team’s path.

Now go forth and make some July basketball content with this!