March Madness is a college basketball tournament to determine the national champions. An interesting way to analyze the historic tournaments is by looking at the winning score during the final game. The graph above shows the men’s March Madness final game’s winning score for historical games. The tournament first started in 1939, but the graph starts in 1985 when the tournament expanded to 64 teams.
The scores vary quite a bit. The highest score was 103 points set by UNLV in 1990. The lowest score was 53 points set by UConn in 2011. That is a 50 point range, which is really a massive range.
On average the winning score is 77 points. This is a good data point to know, for everyone filling out a bracket.
2020 game was canceled due to COVID-19.
March Madness Men’s Champion Winning Score Graph Notes:
The x-axis (horizontal part of the graph) shows the year the game took place. The y-axis (vertical part of the graph) shows the amount of points the winning team scored during the game. Each bar represents the total score for the winning team in the men’s championship game of March Madness. March Madness: The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, is a single-elimination tournament played every March in the United States. It currently features 68 college basketball teams from the Division 1 level of the NCAA, to determine the national champion.
