The Mountain West gets a bad rap for lack of NCAA Tournament success – but how bad has it really been?

Every March we hear complaints about the Mountain West’s lack of success in the NCAA Tournament. “They shouldn’t be a multi-bid league! They never win! They choke every March!” But how true are those claims? How bad has the Mountain West been? Let’s dive into some numbers and take a look.

To begin, a hypothetical. One conference goes 2-3 in the NCAA Tournament. The other goes 4-3. Who had a better tournament? Some would say four wins is better than two and leave it at that. The better answer is it depends. If the first conference went 2-3 with three 12-seeds, that’s a very successful tournament! Likewise, if the second conference went 4-3 with three 1-seeds, that’s a very poor tournament. This concept is called relative seed expectation. Teams with better seeds should go further in the tournament, and success should be based upon the seed a team (or conference) receives.

Using historical data for the tournament, we expect the seed lines to perform as follows:

As such, for a team to be able to meet (or exceed) expectations based on seeding goes as follows: 1-seeds need to make the Final Four, 2-seeds the Elite Eight, 3-6 seeds need to make the Sweet Sixteen, and getting to the second round exceeds expectations for seeds 7 and lower. When we take a conference’s complete seeds, we can come up with a cumulative expectation and compare that to performance to see whether teams underperformed or just had bad seeds.

For the Mountain West in particular, this is what the past decade has looked like:

* For Play-in games, assumed win probability is 50%. Seed expectations for play-in teams is 0.5 wins, plus a 50% chance at their seed’s tournament wins once they reach the first round. (0.5 + 0.5 * Seed Wins)

From this analysis, we can conclude that the Mountain West has certainly underperformed over the past decade. The stretch from 2019-2022 was particularly bad. It’s also fair to say some of the dialogue has been overblown. In the past three tournaments, the Mountain West exceeded their expectations in 2023, and essentially met expectations in 2024 and 2024. Based on seeding, the Mountain West was expected to win 10.66 games the past three seasons and in reality, won… 11. Certainly not a conference underperforming as of late.

More interesting to me is not the fact that the Mountain West has underperformed seed expectation over the past decade, but how other conferences have performed relative to seed expectation. Over the past three completed seasons (2022-2024), it isn’t the Mountain West that’s been the worst performing conference in the NCAA Tournament. It’s the SEC.

That’s right, the conference that just received a record 14 bids has been the most underperforming in March when it comes to the seeds they’re given. Since 2022, the SEC should have expected 30.56 tournament wins, but has won just 22 games. That’s 8.56 games below expectation, as a percentage (which helps account for volume) they’re performing 28% worse than expected. The Mountain West was at 19% over that same stretch. Even more shocking, despite not receiving a single protected seed since 2022, the Mountain West had a team make the Final Four in 2023. Meanwhile, the SEC has received 10 protected bids over the same time span, yet has just one Final Four team over the past three years. When it’s come to producing college basketball’s elite the past three years, the Mountain West and SEC are performing at the same level.

The Mountain West finished the 2025 NCAA Tournament with two wins. A 2-4 record were certainly draw ire from fans of rival conferences, but 2 wins on 2.72 seed expected wins isn’t worth the dialogue it will receive. While Utah State and San Diego State lost in blowout fashion, New Mexico and Colorado State showed themselves well. Both teams won their first round games as double digit seeds and had competitive second round games against top-12 KenPom opponents. The Lobos were leading at halftime against 2-seed Michigan State, before the Spartans pulled away in the second half for an eight point win. Meanwhile, Colorado State led 4-seed Maryland with six seconds left after a go-ahead three, but lost on the first buzzer beater in a tournament game since the 2023 Final Four.

Meanwhile, the SEC’s historic 14-bid season would expect 20.73 wins. The conference sits at 15 wins with seven teams having already been eliminated. Whether or not the “best conference in basketball” meets their seed expectations will depend on their second weekend results, and will likely require getting two teams into the Final Four (or winning the National Championship).

Without a doubt, the Mountain West has failed to meet expectations in the tournament over the past decade, and the conference deserves fair criticism for that. I don’t believe the criticism has been fair though. Other conferences, namely the SEC, have done less with more. We’ve seen the Mountain West get punished for their lack of tournament success with poor seeding; meanwhile, the SEC gets a record number of bids with even worse results. I can’t help but wonder if the committee is even aware of these numbers.

The tide is changing though. For the third straight tournament, the conference put out a strong performance, and it’s time the narrative begins to shift the other way.

And for those curious (I know I was), the Broncos have made the tournament nine times since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. Based on their seeds, expectation has been 4.31 wins over those nine appearances. The Broncos will be searching for win #1 in 2025-26.

Nathan Carroll is a part-time contributor for Bronco Nation News and host of the TBA Basketball Podcast. Nathan works for Pro Football Focus as part of their data collection team, specializing in charting player data at the FBS level. Previously, he graduated from Boise State’s Honors College with a degree in Quantitative Economics and worked 5 years in Boise State’s athletic department. Follow him on X at Nathan_26_