Why losing streaks shouldn't really matter when filling out your NCAA tournament bracket

Are you sitting down? Because you probably should before reading this: Losing streaks don't really matter when filling out your NCAA tournament bracket.

What!? Blasphemy!

Yes, you read that second sentence correctly. Go back and read it again if you want. There's a variety of strategies basketball fans employ when making their March Madness picks: which school's colors they like better, which team's mascot might win in a theoretical fight, which school's name is more fun to say and yes, how teams have recently performed on the court.

We're here to dispel that final notion. We analyzed the results from the last 23 NCAA tournaments and found 79 teams that entered the tournament on a losing streak of at least two games. Forty-seven of those teams (roughly 60 percent) won their Round of 64 matchup. We did not include wins in the First Four.

In total, those teams combined for 89 wins in the NCAA tournament, including 17 Sweet 16s, three Elite Eights and six Final Four appearances, so roughly a third of those teams made the second weekend of the tournament. The most notable and recent example of a team making a deep NCAA tournament run immediately after a losing streak was No. 11 seed UCLA in the 2021 NCAA Tournament, which had lost its final three regular-season games and its first game in the Pac-12 tournament, before it rattled off five wins in a row to become the second team to ever go from the First Four to the Final Four.

The Bruins repeatedly found themselves in tight games. Their loss to the Oregon State Beavers in the Pac-12 tournament, their fourth straight loss, was in overtime, as was their Final Four loss to No. 1 seed Gonzaga. Two of UCLA's five NCAA tournament wins also went to overtime.

This data doesn't suggest that you should automatically pencil in a team on a three-game losing streak into the Final Four, but don't write off a team in the first round just because it left a sour taste in your mouth when you saw that it lost its regular-season finale and the first game in its conference tournament. In fact, the last seven NCAA tournament teams that entered March Madness on a losing streak won at least one game in the tournament, including a pair of teams that were on a four-game slide entering Selection Sunday.

Of course, it's relatively rare for teams to enter the NCAA tournament on a losing streak, given the single-elimination nature of conference tournaments, so there won't be any teams on a losing streak that also earned an automatic bid. Typically, there might be three or four teams per season that make the tournament following a multiple-game losing streak and given that they're at-large teams, the rest of their resume is strong enough that they were still able to make the tournament despite a small, late-season slide, so their ceiling is probably higher than the losing streak might suggest.

Here's a complete list of teams in the last 23 NCAA tournaments that have entered the tournament on a losing streak of at least two games.