March Madness

I’m a sucker for all things statistical and analysis based.  A total numbers junkie.  While imperfect, any attempt to add logic and stats to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is fascinating to me.

Hence, I had to share a couple links that give you the power to review the 68 team field and, in one case, pull the levers that would predict the full bracket for you based upon your own perceptions on what matters in March.

via FiveThirtyEight: FiveThirtyEight’s NCAA tournament forecasting model calculates the chance of each team reaching each round, taking into account a composite of power rankings, pre-season rankings, the team’s placement on the NCAA’s 68-team S-curve, player injuries and geography.

via Huffington Post: Statisticians, basketball experts and sports fans have tried for years to perfect the science of filling out a March Madness bracket. While there are many methods, it’s not always easy to decide which data to include and which to ignore. HuffPost’s Predict-o-Trondetermines each team’s chances of advancing through the 2014 Men’s NCAA basketball tournament with a probabilistic model based on the importance you give different attributes. Try it by moving the sliders, and be sure to share your bracket — you don’t want to miss out on bragging rights if your model ends up correctly predicting the tournament.

Let the madness begin!

P.S. I’ll be in Vegas for the Final Four.  You better believe I will be bringing all of these insights along with my bank account to the sports book…

Til Next Time,

Michael