Richmond is up 16-15 on Iowa right now, but our model still gives the Hawkeyes a healthy 72 percent chance of winning. This reminds me of one of my favorite classic March Madness stories we did, by Stephen Pettigrew in 2015, about how much an underdog has to be winning by to be favored at any point in a tournament game. The TL;DR is that it takes a larger lead than we might think — or a lead deeper into a game — to be favored, especially when the seed differential is as big as it is between Iowa and Richmond.
