Berger & Pope also found a smaller NCAA halftime-deficit effect (2.1–2.5 percentage points) than the NBA's 5.8–8.0

Berger & Pope's paper ("Can Losing Lead to Winning?") does not report the halftime-deficit reversal for the NBA alone. Table 1, Panel B (NCAA basketball data) finds the same directional effect at a smaller magnitude: "in the NCAA, losing at halftime leads to a 2.1 to 2.5 percentage point increase in winning probability," against logit marginal-effects coefficients of .025, .023, .025, and .021 across four specifications — roughly a third the size of the NBA's 5.8–8.0 pp.

The paper attributes the gap partly to selection: professional players are a more experienced, more competitive population than college players, sorted by a career-long filter the NCAA pool has not yet applied. That is offered as an explanation for magnitude, not as a reason to doubt the underlying mechanism — the paper treats both figures as instances of the same loss-aversion-driven reference-point effect (claim-goals-as-reference-points-below-goal-work-harder).

The comparison sharpens a question the vault's later replication work already raises without this number: claim-losing-leads-to-winning-fails-to-replicate-across-four-sports found the NBA effect itself confined to Berger & Pope's original sample window, not later NBA seasons or the NCAA or the WNBA. If selection into professional competitiveness were the real driver, a broader, more selective population should show more of the effect over time as leagues professionalize further — not less. The NCAA figure is worth holding next to that null result as an unresolved tension in the selection story, not yet reconciled here.