In case you’re not watching March Madness, Drake is the darling of the NCAA basketball tournament this year, with good reason. It’s a great story; everyone loves a plot like this. They just beat a higher-seeded team from the SEC by ten points in their first-round game.

It goes to show how hard it is to predict human potential. Winning 30 games and going to the tournament with a coach who was in Division II last year, and doing with with players who were also in Division II last year, is remarkable. Should it be?

In enrollment, we know who the superstars are, and we think it’s pretty easy to identify the students that have very little chance of succeeding in college. But that “vast, airy middle” (a typically pretentious and predictably florid description of the middle of the bell curve by David Coleman, the President of The College Board in this excellent article) is where things get tricky.

We think we know the hierarchy of higher education, and we think we know the hierarchy of college sports. But we’re often wrong: Those students in the middle often end up succeeding well beyond any prediction equation would suggest. Sometimes the Division II athletes can not only run with, but defeat, the thoroughbreds from the big conferences. Tom Brady and Jerry Rice graded out poorly in the NFL combine with the experts who stood with them, talked to them, measured them, and interviewed them.

I’ve frequently written, and I still believe, that graduation rates are generally best described as an input, rather than an output. But almost any group of students holds considerable unrecognized talent and potential. Successful colleges in the coming years will be the ones who figure out ways to identify and develop that potential.

Will your college be one of them?