As a certified Flyer nutcase, I sense certain things. All of us do. Part of our lot in life is suffering Hail Mary losses from halfcourt or Cotton Eyed Joe until we’re six feet under. But let’s not feel too sorry for ourselves. If anyone bothered to look, they would also find six 20-win seasons in the last nine years, three division titles, and a tournament championship along the way. I failed to mention a Maui Invitational title to avoid the fans quick to point out the watered-down tourney field. So I’m not going to mention it.

Still, something is going on around here. The only way to describe it is like walking into a lingerie store with your fly down. Nothing can take away the fact that beautiful women are all around, it’s just a shame that a lack of finish work ruined any chance of taking one home.

That’s UD basketball. They have mastered the art of finding the car keys, driving to the mall, and walking in the front door. Everything beyond that takes a wrong turn. Far less handsome men with far less money and far fewer teeth seem to handle their zipper without a problem. Within minutes they are walking out of Forbidden Fashions with three phone numbers and a Tiger Woods fist pump. Meanwhile, the Flyers are back in the food court trying to bum another movie date from the fry clerk at Whammyburger.

If I haven’t sketched a strong enough portrait of suffering, consider this: I have the empirical data to prove it. When your gut tells you something, something tells you to trust your instincts. So I embarked on a journey for truth to see if the stomach acid was justified. After three weeks of crunching data, things started to add up. By things I mean bad news and by adding up I mean legitimizing suspicions.

Before I get to the data, I should explain the numbers behind it. I started from the ground up by recognizing Dayton Flyer fans among the most loyal in college basketball. I then leveraged the tremendous UD fan base against NCAA Tournament success over the last decade and a half. My hypothesis was undeniably simple: the Flyer Faithful suffer more Big Dance diarrhea as a whole than nearly any other college basketball program in the nation. Specifically, programs Dayton considers at or near the same level of funding, support, tradition, and reputation.

To make the data pool consistent, I used the Top-100 programs in 2006 average attendance to account for the sample. This was done for two important reasons. First, fan support is synonymous with Flyer basketball. Second, fan support is usually indicative of program health. By using the Top-100 supported programs, I was practically assuring myself of a static gene pool over life of the data. For those that follow yearly attendance closely, the Top-30 programs in the country rarely get bumped off their perch. Much of that is due to facility size as much as fan base. The Flyers enjoy both the support and facility on par with most Top-30 programs. Outside the Top-30, fan support takes a nosedive and the closer one reaches the bottom, the less in common they have with a basketball program such as Dayton. The dollars don’t exist, the support more apathetic, the recruiting tools and conference pull less ideal. Using a sample this large eliminates excuses.

I had my pool of teams, I just needed a timeframe to calculate tournament success. I chose the last decade and all of this decade if for no other reason it falls nicely with the calendar and anything before it is unlikely to represent the tournament health of a current basketball program. Using 1991-2006 as my fishing pond, the painstaking task of charting all 100 programs from the 2006 attendance leaderboard began in earnest.

One by one I went through every NCAA tournament bracket from 1991 and started plotting success or failure. Victories in each round were marked that would later funnel through a multiplier to award teams with better performances; the deeper the tourney run, the larger the multiplier. Nothing complicated.

About halfway through the brackets I noticed an alarming trend. Schools up and down the attendance Top-100 were earning points while Dayton sat alone in a corner sucking on a lollipop. As more brackets were completed and more teams plotted, the results kept getting worse — far worse than I originally thought. I knew most teams in the attendance Top-30 would sport healthy NCAA resumes, but most of the other teams were outpacing the Flyers too. Even toward the very bottom.

A few more days of work finished up the remaining brackets and now it was time to add up the points. I totaled two straightforward variables — NCAA wins and Total NCAA Points — that would be used to form a rough conclusion or two. But I wasn’t where I needed to be. My initial premise was based upon the assumption that Dayton fans — fan for fan — suffer more as a collective fan base in the NCAA Tournament than other fan bases. For that, I worked out a simple formula to leverage fan base size with tournament success. The theory is, programs that win when it counts generate larger fan bases and larger fan bases choose programs that know how to win when it counts.

Based upon this calculation, I created a TOAD (TOurnament Achievement Deficiency) number that represents the divide between tournament success and fan base reward. Programs that perform well in the NCAAs in relation to their fan support (home attendance) would do very well and identify schools that reward fan bases extremely well in the postseason. Programs that lack NCAA success and maintain large fans bases would suffer and ultimately point out schools falling short on rewarding loyal ticketholders.

The arithmetic for every team’s TOAD value is this:
2006 average attendance / Total NCAA Points / 16yrs [1991-2006] = TOAD

The smaller the TOAD, the more efficient the fan reward based on average attendance. The larger the TOAD, the less efficient the fan reward.

One caveat I must mention is average attendance. Under perfect circumstances an average of average attendance would be ideal from 1991-2006 for each program currently in the 2006 Top-100, however NCAA data was shaky after the Top-100 attendance leaders each year going back to 1991. While most of the Top-50 schools would remain in Top-100 attendance lists from year to year, teams toward the bottom might fall out for a number of years and offer no doubt to calculate a yearly average. I worked on the small assumption that the Top-50 attendance leaders are relatively static and NCAA numbers affirm this. Those in the bottom 50 include only the remaining programs Dayton might consider in basketball competition with. Collectively, the 2006 attendance Top-100 strikes a consistent balance of schools that qualify under similar fan support or similar program goals. Nonetheless with an attendance sample of just one year, there remains a bit of wiggle room for teams experiencing an unusual attendance spike (or drop) that would in turn affect their TOAD value disproportionately to their 16yr average.

After all was said and done, Dayton still looked like the guy with his zipper down.

I’ll let the data speak for itself. This exercise is not meant to answer the how or why. I can tell you that Dayton finished 50th out of the Top-50 attendance programs in NCAA success. Among the Top-100, things were marginally better or worse depending on your point of view. It’s worth reminding that this exercise only measures NCAA Tournament success parlayed against the fan base behind it. It is not meant to measure overall program health because regular season success carries considerable weight. That said, it does support the notion by some fans that Dayton basketball does less with more around NCAA Tournament time than other schools large and small. The Flyers have had chances and just a win or two could have spun the numbers far differently. But such can be said for other programs too. In the end, it is what it is and that’s all it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. The pretty girl in the lingerie shop remains seemingly untouchable at times. While it’s easy cast stones at her poor choice of handsome beaus, approaching the front door with your fly open is never a good way to make lasting impression when it counts the most.

TAKE ME TO THE DATA!