This article observes that regular-season champions in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men’s basketball often perform poorly in season-ending conference tournaments and examines two alternative explanations for this underperformance. We employ data on regular-season champions during the period 1990-2004 to test between competing models of “tanking” motivated by (a) fitness saving for the NCAA tournament and (b) a form of corruption. Our empirical results confirm that systematic under-performance does occur and indicate that corruption is a likely motivation.
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