“Survive and Advance” to the Final Four
“Survive and Advance.” It’s a motto that comes up almost every March nowadays, with its origin attributed to a Jim Valvano quote during the 1983 NC State Wolfpack’s miracle run to the championship. Given the single-elimination nature of the NCAA Tournament, and the fact that many of these games come down to a couple possessions at the end, it’s also an appropriate quote.
As Virginia, Michigan State, Texas Tech, and Auburn get set to take the court in the Final Four in Minneapolis, each team has had to survive some very close games and tense moments to make it this far. Just last weekend, Virginia looked to be down and out against Purdue, before Mamadi Diakite’s buzzer-beater — off a scramble following a free throw tip-out — kept the Cavaliers alive, allowing them the chance to win in overtime.
Without that single shot, the whole narrative flips for Virginia. Another NCAA Tournament letdown. Another year of hot takes on if Tony Bennett’s team’s style of play will ever allow them to make the Final Four. Potentially a Final Four without any 1-seeds! (Duke, the other remaining 1-seed at the time of this game, lost the next day.)
Virginia’s opponent on Saturday, Auburn, also needed overtime in the Elite Eight to get to Minneapolis. But if we look back further to the first game of the Tigers’ NCAA Tournament run, they had to survive a potentially devastating buzzer-beater against New Mexico State:
Imagine if that last shot — a fairly open look for a 35% 3-point shooter (who had gone 4–7 from three to that point in the game) — falls. Instead of being lauded for knocking off traditional powerhouses Kansas, North Carolina, and Kentucky en route to the school’s first Final Four, Bruce Pearl would be criticized for his team blowing an eight-point lead in the final two minutes to a 12-seed. No Auburn students rolling Toomer’s Corner to celebrate. No tears of joy for famous alum Charles Barkley.
Of course, these types of endings are not unique to this year’s tournament. College basketball fans with good memories can likely think of prior Final Four teams who also needed a buzzer-beater to stay alive or were lucky that a shot that could’ve knocked them out didn’t fall.
How BigQuery Can Help Find “Survive and Advance” Moments
Our personal memories are good for remembering great anecdotes…but maybe not all close calls like this. After all, there are dozens of NCAA Tournament games each year, many games that go down to the wire (sometimes multiple going on at the same time!), and lots of late-game shots of different kinds. What’s better than our own memory bank if we want to know how often Final Four teams had to “survive and advance” in this way? A data set of NCAA play-by-play data and BigQuery!
Our goal was to look at Final Four teams of the past few years and see just how many had a “survive-and-advance” shot go their way on the path to the season’s final weekend. To that end, we looked at two specific types of shots in the final few seconds of NCAA Tournament games for eventual Final Four teams:
- A game-tying or go-ahead field goal attempt (FGA) or free throw attempt (FTA) by the team, when trailing — i.e,. a shot the team “had to make” to stay alive (e.g. Virginia vs Purdue)
- A go-ahead FGA or FTA by the opponent — i.e., a shot the opponent “had to miss” for the team to stay alive (e.g. Auburn vs New Mexico State)
We limited FGA to the final five seconds and FTA to the final two seconds (stricter, since the game clock isn’t running on these) to get very, very late shots that were essentially “make-or-break” attempts from the Final Four team’s perspective. This may seem somewhat strict, and it is — Michigan State fans might argue that their Elite Eight win against Duke felt like near-death, even though they never had a moment that qualifies under this criteria. But our goal was to try our best to identify those very, very specific “ball in the air, season on the line”-type moments.
The analysis here is nowhere near as statistical nor as multi-layered as what we’ve done to generate team metrics like Score Control and Clutchness — we are really only trying to find a list of shots from our database. But the setup to be able to identify these shots thoroughly is still extensive enough to dig into a little bit…
We start with our play-by-play data set that has the time of each event in each game, which we need to sequence to get the proper score from each team’s perspective before each play. In the past, we only looked at scoring plays, but here we need to look at all shots, including misses, so our sequencing has to be more thorough. We need to know both the score before each shot and the potential points on the shot to know if it was a game-tying or go-ahead attempt. Below is a snippet of the subquery we use, heavily relying on analytic functions, to get this information.
Further complicating matters is that our default play-by-play data set goes back five years, but we were greedy and wanted more! We had more play-by-play data going back an additional five years — a bit less complete, but had all the NCAA Tournament games we were concerned with for this purpose — in a different table with a slightly different schema. Though it was work to combine the two, we wanted to have a full decade of survive-and-advance moments, and we knew BigQuery could handle it. So we wrote another subquery like the one above to extract play-by-play information, used “UNION ALL” to put the two play-by-play data sets together, tagged shots as “go-ahead” or “game-tying” based on the possible scoring change on each one, and wound up with a view that produces nearly 28 million rows of data across the last 10 seasons.
From there, we needed to filter down to the relatively small subset of pre-Final Four Tournament games for Final Four teams (a list that was itself generated using a series of BigQuery views), limit the play-by-play to those shots that satisfy our criteria in those games, and then add some information from the Final Four team’s perspective on each shot. We present most of the SQL query used to do this below — nothing very unique, just using joins and logic to filter down to the specific plays from the specific games we were interested in.
Finally, we can run our query and get our list of “survive and advance” shots!
We see that this query returns a list of 23 such shots, covering 17 different Final Four teams across 10 years. That’s right: even with our very strict definition of what qualifies, nearly half of the 40 Final Four teams since 2010 show up here! Virginia and Auburn aren’t exceptional cases; to get to the Final Four, needing a single shot to go your way in the final moments of a Tournament game is relatively common.
On a technical note, notice that it took a mere 13 seconds for BigQuery to process 4.7 GB of data — merging two different play-by-play sets, sequencing every play within every game, and doing a series of joins on the way to the final result. This type of speed is very important during development, as we tried out multiple iterations of this query to make sure we got it as close to “right” as possible.
A Decade of “Survive and Advance” Shots for Final Four Teams
If you’re an NCAA Tournament junkie, the list above is pretty interesting, with some familiar teams, games, players, and shots. But it’s still just a list, and for most of us — even the data scientists among us — these moments don’t live in our memories as a table of results. Like the clips above, they are visuals, some of which are shown every year because they capture the excitement and unpredictability of “March Madness.”
Since we don’t have video tagged to our NCAA Tournament play-by-play (though this is possible), we resorted to some more traditional Google tools to find short clips of all 23 shots listed above: Google Search and YouTube! We showed Virginia and Auburn’s moments above; what follows are the others from the previous nine Tournaments, in reverse chronological order. We hope you enjoy this trip down NCAA Tournament memory lane!
2018 Kansas
The theme of Duke and last-second shots rolling around the rim goes back to last year’s Tournament, where Kansas had to survive a Grayson Allen jumper in the Elite Eight:
The Jayhawks would go on to win in overtime.
2018 Michigan
On the way to the championship game a year ago, the Wolverines were on the ropes in the Round of 32 against Houston. Enter Jordan Poole…
2018 Loyola Chicago
Three of last year’s Final Four teams needed to have a last-second shot fall their way to make it to San Antonio, but the 11th-seeded Ramblers actually needed THREE such shots to go their way. In their first game versus Miami, Donte Ingram knocked down the game-winner in the last second…
Then in the next round against Tennessee, it was Clayton Custer with the clutch shot-making…
…and even after that, the Ramblers had to survive one final attempt from Tennessee’s Jordan Bone that still could have knocked them out before the Sweet 16.
After watching these, it’s worth remembering that Loyola-Chicago seemingly had divine intervention on its side during last year’s Final Four run.
2017 Oregon
For Michigan fans, a couple other shots by their team listed here are more memorable because they went in. For Oregon fans, this one from the 2017 Sweet 16 is more appealing, since the Wolverines’ miss at the buzzer allowed the Ducks to continue on their path to the Final Four.
2016 Syracuse
10th-seed Syracuse made a surprise run to the Final Four in 2016, but it could’ve been 11th-seeded Gonzaga continuing its own underdog run past the Sweet 16 had Josh Perkins’ go-ahead jumper in the final seconds not been blocked.
2015 Kentucky
One of the more memorable misses on this list. Kentucky’s undefeated season was on the line in a back-and-forth Elite Eight battle against Notre Dame, and Jerian Grant had a chance to play giant-slayer at the buzzer…
The Wildcats survived to improve to 38–0, but saw their dreams of an undefeated season come to an end against Wisconsin in the Final Four.
2014 Wisconsin
Speaking of Wisconsin, the previous year, the Badgers had to survive a last-second scare of their own against Arizona in the Elite Eight.
This is one example where we see the limitations of our play-by-play data relative to what we can see on video. While it appears that Nick Johnson’s shot would’ve won the game and knocked out the Badgers — and therefore satisfies our “ball in the air, season on the line” criteria — technically the shot was after buzzer and wouldn’t have counted.
2014 Kentucky
A year before their own “pursuit of perfection” came up short in the NCAA Tournament, it was Kentucky playing the role of spoiler against 35–0 Wichita State in the Round of 32. The Shockers’ Fred Van Fleet had the final chance to save the undefeated season…
…but the 8th-seeded Wildcats survived and would go on to win three more games before losing to UConn in the title game.
2014 UConn
Speaking of UConn, the eventual national champions could’ve seen their own magical run end before it really even got started! In the first round, Langston Galloway had a chance to give St. Joseph’s the lead in the final seconds…
The Huskies would go on to win in overtime, and this game was probably their closest call on the path to that championship.
2013 Michigan
Michigan played an epic game against top-seeded Kansas in the Sweet 16, rallying from 14 down in the final seven minutes to make it a game. Still, they pretty much needed this LONG three-pointer from Trey Burke…
…and then had to avert this potential buzzer-beater at the end of regulation…
…and one more at the end of overtime…
…to survive and move on to the Elite Eight.
2011 UConn
In a year with one of the most unlikely Final Fours in history, the 3rd-seeded Huskies were actually the best seed to make it there. This go-ahead shot by Jamelle Horne at the end of their Elite Eight game would’ve only increased the madness, likely putting 5th-seeded Arizona through instead…
Like the 2014 Huskies, this UConn team went from surviving on a last-second shot to national champions — the only two such champions on this list.
2011 Butler
The 8th-seeded Bulldogs made it a habit of playing close games on their way to the title game, showing up three times on our list. Their Round of 32 game against Pittsburgh had one of the more bizarre finishes in Tournament history. They needed this shot from Andrew Smith as time was running out…
…which gave them a lead with 2.2 seconds left. But after committing an inexplicable foul on the ensuing inbounds, they actually needed to survive this potential go-ahead free throw from Pitt’s Gilbert Brown.
As is shown at the end of the clip above, Pittsburgh committed its own egregious foul on the rebound, and Butler would go on to win with the subsequent free throw.
A week later against Florida in the Elite Eight, Butler had to sweat out another potential game-winner…
…before going on to win in overtime.
2011 VCU
Perhaps the most unlikely of participants in the 2011 Final Four was VCU, who went from the First Four to the Final Four. Surprisingly, the 11th-seeded Rams didn’t have many close calls on their path, but did had to survive this attempt from Florida State at end of their Sweet 16 game…
Like the 2014 Wisconsin example, we can see the limitations of our play-by-play data. While this was still a must-have stop for VCU, technically the shot itself was after buzzer and wouldn’t have counted.
2011 Kentucky
That’s right: all four Final Four participants in 2011 needed some late-game fortune along the way. In the Sweet 16, Kentucky played a great game against top overall seed Ohio State, but still needed to survive this three-pointer to finish off the upset…
2010 Michigan State
Michigan State has been one of the more regular Final Four participants under coach Tom Izzo. Spartan fans will fondly remember this ending to their Round of 32 game against Maryland in 2010 — one of the more iconic buzzer-beaters in recent NCAA Tournament history.
We hope you enjoyed this tour through some recent “make or break” March Madness moments, with BigQuery helping us put this year’s Final Four teams’ “survive and advance” shots in greater context. Here’s to hoping for more memorable finishes over the next couple days in Minneapolis!
Special thanks to Elissa Lerner
