IT’S HEEEEEEEEERE!!!
It’s March and the tournaments have started playing! We held our team meeting at Buffalo Wild Wings eating saucy chicken and watching 35 big screen TVs with various games going on. This is the greatest time of the year!
While chatting, we saw an interesting tweet put out by a fellow CBB aficionado, @EvanMiya about Oral Roberts and thought that his claim deserved a little deeper look.
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I went to a game last night just for fun. The teams are irrelevant for the purpose of this conversation; suffice to say that both were middling, neither has a shot at the NCAA tournament and none of it has implications of national merit. But man, it’s almost March and it’s college basketball, it was a blast! 15,590 fans just having a great time sending off the seniors and hoping for a shift in fortunes during the Conference Tournament.
The beauty of CBB is that anyone can be a Cinderella. As I watched the event, the home team played the best game of their season. They were balanced on offense, they shutdown the other team’s two main threats. They rebounded well, controlled their turnovers and staved off multiple run attempts of their foe. At one point they were up by 21 and I thought to myself, “Man, if they play like this, who knows, three good games in the conference tourney and they could slip into an automatic bid.” I was impressed and drinking the Kool-aid.
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Welcome to week 15 of the college basketball season. 15 is really not terribly significant, but two weeks ago was. So let’s go in the way back machine, speed it up to 86 mph and look at the AP standings from week 13. Then let’s figure out why this ranking is important.
Continue readingI’ve gathered bracket probabilities from other websites to compare with my model’s results. Here are the numbers from those models as well as a composite (average of all the models) probability for every team reaching each round. Apologies to the other play-in teams, but I assumed Rutgers, Indiana, Texas A&M-CC, and Wright State win their First Four games.
I’ll show the numbers in a few different looks – Champs, First Round Upsets, Bracket Busters, Cinderellas, Busts, Dark Horse Final Four, and a composite for All Teams/All Rounds – get your scrolling fingers ready!
I was able to find predictions at the following websites:
A dark horse Final Four team is a 5+ seed that reaches the Final Four.
Even though 83% of all Final Four teams have been seeded 1-4, 10 of the last 11 tournaments have had at least 1 5+ seed in the Final Four. The following teams have the best chances among this year’s “longshots.”
Continue readingWin your bracket pool by using simulation results from BracketResearch.com’s computer model that amazingly predicts NCAA Tournament outcomes.
No surprise – Gonzaga’s the favorite. Perhaps the biggest surprise is 5-Connecticut’s not insignificant 12% chance of winning the region. There is a 91% chance the winner will be one of seven teams…
Continue readingWin your bracket pool by using simulation results from BracketResearch.com’s computer model that amazingly predicts NCAA Tournament outcomes.
The East Region is home to the double digit seed with the highest Final Four probability. It’s only 4%, but 10-San Francisco has best chances of a Final Four run of any double-digit seed in the bracket.
Continue readingWin your bracket pool by using simulation results from BracketResearch.com’s computer model that amazingly predicts NCAA Tournament outcomes.
The Midwest Region is the most top heavy in the bracket – there is a 63% chance the winner is one of the top 2 seeds. We also find the weakest 3 and 4 seeds here – the 5 and 6 seeds are more likely to win the region.
Continue readingWin your bracket pool by using simulation results from BracketResearch.com’s computer model that amazingly predicts NCAA Tournament outcomes.
The South Region is the most competitive this year. By that, I mean there is only a 42% chance one of the top 2 seeds will win the region – the lowest chance of any region. There is a 95% chance the winner will be one of nine teams…
Continue readingCorrectly picking the champ is the most important part of winning any bracket competition. Hitting on a Final Four pick or two is also key to having a top scoring NCAA Tournament bracket. Identifying teams that don’t measure up in some way to past Final Four teams can help. Here’s a thread where I list 18 teams (seeded 3-11) that should at least think twice about before making them our Final Four picks.
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