"Dance Chance" Tracks A Team's Progress Toward NCAA Berth

The Dance Chance is our attempt to quantify a team's odds of making the NCAA tournament as an at-large team as those odds change throughout the season. It uses a fairly simple formula to separate teams into those who are locks, near-locks, bubble teams, doubtfuls, and no-chancers.

Those are just made-up tags; we don't really use those designations. Instead each team is assigned a percentage based on these factors:

1. RPI ranking: because whether formally used by the committee or not, it's a good rough indicator for NCAA selection odds
2. RealWins Ratings: Our RealWins ratings reward teams with quality wins, and increase througout the year.
3. Record: Teams that hit certain thresholds are more likely to be selected...with certain caveats. And too many losses hurt a team, of course.
4. Conference Record: Just as important as overall record
5. Conference: Teams from Major conferences have lower requirements than mid-major, or especially minor conferences in record and conference record.

The Dance Chance percentage reflects one of two things.

1. At the end of the regular season, the Dance Chance is the percentage chance a team has to make the tournament as an at-large team. Once into March, there will be several teams at 100% and by selection Sunday at least a few dozen. The number of teams at 0% will number over 250. The 50 or so in-between 0% and 100% are the bubble teams, some almost certain to get in, others extreme longshots.


2. For most of the season, it provides a ranking of which teams have the best tournament résumés. It doesn't really mean "the odds a team will end up in the tournament" until we get into March.
   
   For example, we could say Duke is pretty much 100% likely to make the tournament right now. But if they lost the rest of their games, they wouldn't make it. The Dance Chance doesn't look at how good a team is, only what they've already done. It assumes a team could collapse and be left with only what they've accomplished so far.
   
   Once a team hits 100% in the Dance Chance, it means that they are basically unable to avoid being in the tournament, even with a total collapse. A rating of 0%, though, doesn't necessarily mean a team can't possibly make it under any circumstances. Just that it's very unlikely unless they win their conference.
   
   Teams don't start to hit 100% until some time in January because of the conference wins requirement. Most teams need to prove that they're going to do somewhat well in conference play before they can reach 100.

Since we're already pretty far into the season, many teams have done almost enough to become a "lock," but don't have many conference wins.

The rankings aren't meant to be "seeds", particularly during the early parts of the season. The rankings will take on more of the look of a proper NCAA seeding later in the year, but there isn't a greater advantage to having better statistics beyond a certain value, so by the time there are 20-25 "locks" those teams will be somewhat interchangeable. The formula is more concerned with the positions around #50 than it is the slots around #1.