Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website did a study on who the best coach is in NCAA Tournament history. Here’s how FiveThirtyEight determined that Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, Louisville’s Rick Pitino and Kentucky’s John Calipari are the best of all time.
We can track where Izzo ranks among all tournament coaches in the 64-team bracket era1 by comparing his actual wins to the number we’d expect of a team with the same seedings and pre-tournamentSimple Rating System (SRS) ratings. And — spoiler alert — he’s No. 1 by a wide margin.
To illustrate the method, a typical No. 7 seed would expect to win about 0.9 games per tournament, on average, while a No. 7 seed with an SRS 2.9 points better than the seed average — like Michigan State this season — would expect to win about 1.0 games per tournament.
