D
uring his eight years coaching
at Michigan, John Beilein has
guided five teams to the NCAA
Tournament, and once there the
Wolverines tend to overachieve ac-
cording to the criteria outlined by
ESPN's FiveThirtyEight.com Web
site.
The statistical site, founded and
run by esteemed political predic-
tor Nate Silver, looked at how ev-
ery team performed by seed since
the arrival of the 64-team field in
1985, thus establishing a baseline
for how many games each seed tra-
ditionally wins. For example, a No.
1 seed, on average, wins 3.3 games
per NCAA Tournament while a
No. 2 seed wins 2.3 games, and on
down.
Using this formula, and compar-
ing it to how a coach's teams fared
in postseason play, FiveThirtyEight.
com devised WAE (wins above
expectation) and calculated that
Michigan State's Tom Izzo is the
top tournament coach of the past 30
years with a career 16.4 WAE.
Michigan's Beilein ranks eighth
all time, including his stops at
Canisius (1993-97), Richmond
Inside Michigan
ATHLETICS
Study Shows John Beilein's Teams
Overachieve In Tourney
Beilein is one of the best in the Big Ten, and the
nation, at leading his team to NCAA Tournament
success above and beyond its initial seeding.
PHOTO BY PER KJELDSEN
