As a Purdue Boilermakers fan, I’ve experienced plenty of heartbreak during the N.C.A.A. tournament. Was it a matter of skill, or of chance?

March 23, 2025

Trey Kaufman-Renn, of the Purdue Boilermakers, shoots during the 2025 N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament in March.

Photograph by Ben Solomon / N.C.A.A. / Getty

The beauty of March Madness is that anything can happen. The horror of March Madness is that, really, anything can happen. Unlike the college-football playoffs—which are highly restrictive, and weighted toward bigger schools from powerhouse conferences—the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament features sixty-eight teams, playing in a sudden-death format. This produces as much good basketball as it does weird basketball. Although this year’s tournament initially seemed short on upsets—in each region, the Top Four seeds all advanced to the second round—there were some mind-boggling early games, such as the victory of twelfth-seeded McNeese State over fifth-seeded Clemson. The final score, 69–67, does not properly reflect the extent of Clemon’s collapse: the team scored just thirteen points in the first half of the game. As the New York Post later wrote, of a team that nearly made it to the Final Four last year, “Clemson went from Elite Eight to Unlucky 13.”

Mark Robert Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of “The Random Factor,” who has written about the role of chance in sports, said that, according to a 2012 study estimating the contribution of luck to a team’s over-all season, basketball is actually the sport in which luck plays the smallest role, as opposed to football, hockey, baseball, and soccer. (Hockey was found to be the most luck-based; the study estimated that around fifty-three per cent of a team’s performance in an N.H.L. season can be attributed to chance.) In basketball, Rank explained, there are plenty of opportunities for each team to score, making it less likely that one freak play will ultimately determine the outcome of a game. Whereas in hockey or soccer, a team may only be shooting and scoring once or twice, creating a situation in which teams are more likely to lose because of something beyond their control, like a bad bounce.

When Rank and I spoke on Friday, he made the case that a basketball game should be evaluated holistically. When a team makes an exhilarating buzzer-beater, he told me, “that final shot may have involved some luck, but then there were these five other opportunities before that.” Basketball fans, in their hearts, know that to be true: that late-game devastation could very well have been avoided by better free-throw shooting in the first half. And yet this mind-set is also antithetical to how people watch basketball, especially during the N.C.A.A. tournament, which is with an inordinate focus on the incredible things—and the absolute bullshit—that happens at the very end of the game.

Many college-basketball fans have good reason to believe that their teams are uniquely unlucky. Take fifth-seeded Butler, who played No. 1-seeded Duke in the national-championship game, in 2010. When Butler was down by two points and had a chance to win at the buzzer, the team’s forward Gordon Hayward threw up a half-court shot that hit the backboard and bounced off the rim—“one of the greatest what-if moments not just in college basketball, but all sports,” as Sports Illustrated later put it. Or consider eleventh-seeded Northern Iowa, a Cinderella team in 2016 that, in the second round of the tournament, gave up a twelve-point lead in the final thirty-five seconds, allowing their opponent, Texas A. & M., to take them to overtime, and then to double overtime, during which A. & M. won. “I would quit basketball,” LeBron James said, after the game. “If I was on Northern Iowa, I would quit.”

As a lifelong fan of the Purdue Boilermakers, I am perhaps overly receptive to the idea that there are ineffable forces at work, preventing a team from reaching its highest potential. I didn’t go to Purdue, but my dad did, along with most of my family; the school, in West Lafayette, Indiana, has produced aeronautical giants such as Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and literal giants such as Zach Edey, our former seven-foot-four-inch center. To become a Purdue basketball fan, pre-Edey, was to inherit a kind of generational trauma: the team was seemingly cursed, having made it to the Final Four in 1980, and not doing so so for another forty-four years, despite many solid opportunities. Our 2018-19 basketball season nearly broke me. It was full of nail-biters; when we lost, it was often by just a few points. In January of 2019, Joe Boozell, a former college-basketball writer for NCAA.com, noted that the Boilermakers were likely better than their record suggested, and he predicted that they might be due for a surge. He was right: that year, we made it to the Elite Eight, for the first time in nineteen years. We lost, in overtime, to Virginia, in what is widely recognized as one of the most exciting games in N.C.A.A. history. Virginia then went on to win the whole thing, of course, besting Texas Tech in a final championship game, which also went into overtime. In that game, too, luck seemed to be in Virginia’s favor: with just a minute left to go in overtime, and Virginia leading by two, the ball went out of bounds. Officials initially ruled that Tech had possession. Then, after an agonizing review, involving super-slow-motion replays and the analysis of multiple camera angles, the refs determined, more than two minutes later, that the ball had brushed a Tech player’s pinkie on the way out. Virginia’s ball.

Virginia was lucky, and Purdue was unlucky. That’s how I internalized the events of 2019. But it wasn’t just a cope—it ended up being borne out, statistically.

Many college hoops fans are familiar with KenPom, a website run by the independent analyst Ken Pomeroy. The N.C.A.A. selection committee now officially uses Pomeroy’s data, alongside those of Bart Torvik—the basketball-obsessed lawyer behind T-Rank, a statistical ranking system—when deciding which teams will get which seed. These days, both Pomeroy and Torvik try to take some version of chance into account when publishing their data, though it doesn’t affect their over-all ratings of college teams. KenPom tracks a stat that Pomeroy literally calls “luck,” Torvik refers to his as “FUN,” which stands for Fortune—or Failure—Unexplained by Numbers. Both stats are meant to capture the deviation between a team’s actual record and their expected record, which can help explain fascinating discrepancies: why a mediocre team has a near-perfect record, for instance, or why a very good team has a mediocre one.

In 2019, Purdue finished the season at two hundred and twenty-fourth in luck, according to KenPom—toward the bottom of the ranks. “They started out very unlucky, then were redeemed (and then perhaps got specifically very unlucky against UVA),” Torvick told me, over e-mail. That season, basketball analysts noticed something strange, which was captured indirectly by the luck stat. As Boozell, the NCAA.com writer, noted, in January of that year, when Purdue’s opponents went to the free-throw line, they suddenly became lights-out shooters, making seventy-seven per cent from the line. This is perhaps the purest example of something that would seem entirely out of Purdue’s control, since its players were simply standing and watching. (The only explanation is that we were just that unintimidating.)

This year, conversations about luck have focussed, in part, on another team in the Big Ten conference: the Michigan Wolverines. Michigan has been lucky. As Torvik explained, they’ve “won a ton of close games,” while a few of their losses have been blowouts. My colleague Zach Helfand, a Michigan fan, noted that this trend might not be that of a team mounting several comeback wins but, rather, that of one narrowly avoiding losses. (Michigan often had early, dominant leads in some of these games that ended up close.) “Would you call this luck, or would you call this nearly choking?” I asked. Helfand responded, “Probably nearly choking.”

And yet the difference between nearly choking—and actually choking—is everything. Some have argued that the “luck factor” really has very little to do with luck at all. What appears to be luck is actually a demonstration of skill: strong endgame coaching, say, or general mental fortitude. There’s an argument to be made that lucky teams are really just clutch ones. “As the unexpected results accumulate, they sort of get ratified,” Torvik said. After a series of so-called lucky breaks, the difference between a lucky team and a good one becomes less distinguishable. Fifth-seeded Michigan won again on Saturday, against fourth-seeded Texas A. & M., despite the Wolverines being down by four points at halftime.

I could talk all day about Purdue’s unlucky breaks, but the trouble with the team, historically, has perhaps been a mental one. During the Edey era, it was clear that they were physically capable of beating just about any team. What they were unable to beat was a good narrative. Two years in a row, Purdue functioned in the tournament as a pit stop in other schools’ Cinderella stories. In 2022, they fell to Saint Peter’s in the Sweet Sixteen, leading to the first time in March Madness history that a fifteenth-seed reached the Elite Eight. The loss racked their confidence. The following year, Purdue clinched a No. 1 seed in the tournament, and yet a Times piece noted that, in the lead-up to their first game, many of the players were having trouble sleeping. The team had a sports psychologist travelling with them during the tournament; she advised, among other things, drinking tea, journalling, and “watching television shows they had already seen.” The “Mad Men” reruns didn’t work—they lost in the first round to Fairleigh Dickinson University, becoming only the second top-ranked team in tournament history to lose to a sixteen seed.

Last season, Purdue finally broke the curse; we reached the national championship game, where we lost to UConn in a game that felt completely devoid of chance. Torvik said that, this year, Purdue’s luck stat isn’t particularly noteworthy, which feels anecdotally true, too. And yet there’s still the occasional fluke. The worst part, perhaps, is the feeling that your own bad luck is rubbing off on your team. I discovered long ago that my attendance at a Purdue game greatly increases the odds of Purdue losing. My dad and I have tried to be strategic, buying tickets only for games in which we’re certain that Purdue will be victorious. And so, late last year, we drove to Pennsylvania, to watch the Boilermakers—ranked eighth in the country at the time—take on the unranked Penn State Nittany Lions. This was Penn State’s first win against a Top Ten team in five years.

Many Purdue fans have concluded that the best thing they can do for the Boilermakers is to not watch them play at all. My dad sometimes abstains from viewing live games on television, a tactic that he says has been “working generally well.” But there’s really no point in being devoted to a team you can’t watch. So, on Saturday, I travelled to Providence, Rhode Island to watch Purdue play McNeese State in the second round of the tournament. After their win over Clemson, McNeese became a popular upset pick: ESPN’s Jay Bilas predicted that they would continue their hot streak and beat Purdue. Online betting analysts recommended that people put money on McNeese to cover the spread if not outright win. At the game, there weren’t too many McNeese fans—Providence is quite a trek from McNeese’s campus in Louisiana—but there were a ton of fans from St. John’s, a university in Queens, as their second-seeded team was set to play tenth-seeded Arkansas on the same court, after the Purdue game was done. A lot of these St. John’s fans had placed bets on McNeese. The game wasn’t even close; Purdue took an early lead and maintained it, avoiding the upset and also potentially bankrupting my neighbors. Sometimes, a game goes exactly the way the rankings would suggest. I wish I could say the same for St. John’s: they lost to Arkansas, in a game that was thrillingly close throughout. It felt pretty unlucky. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated Arkansas’s rank.