There’s something delightfully absurd about learning a serious analytics tool and immediately using it to answer the most important question in college basketball: Who actually wins this thing?
So there I am in Tableau, building my very first pie chart about March Madness championship seeds from 2005–2024. I’m thinking this will be a nice, simple exercise. Just some slices, some labels, a little color.
But then the chart appears.
And the 1-seed is taking up over a third of the pie.
Twenty-eight titles.
Twenty-eight!
The one-seed isn’t even competing anymore. It’s just walking into the tournament like it owns the place. It’s the basketball equivalent of that guy who shows up at trivia night and somehow knows every answer. Nobody likes him, but you can’t argue with the results.
Then you’ve got the 2-seed. Fourteen titles. Respectable. Solid. The dependable middle manager of college basketball. Not flashy. Gets the job done. Probably drives a sensible sedan.
The 3s, 4s, and 5s? These are the character actors of the bracket. Not the star of the movie, but occasionally they steal the scene. Every once in a while one of them wins the whole thing and everyone goes, “Wait… who?”
And then way out there on the edge of the pie chart are the 7s, 8s, 10s, and 11s. These are the chaos agents. The wildcard contestants. The guy who accidentally wins a cooking show even though he thought he was auditioning for The Price Is Right.
This is the fun part about playing with data tools like Tableau. You start out learning how to drag fields into a visualization… and suddenly you’re staring at the statistical reality of March Madness.
The tournament sells us chaos.
But the data?
The data says the big dogs usually eat.
Still… every year we all fill out a bracket and convince ourselves that an 11-seed from somewhere called East Western Tech State is about to shock the world.
And honestly… I hope they do.