FiveThirtyEight’s NCAA Tournament Predictions

http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/march-madness-predictions/

by gmu3 • 12 years ago

54 18 12 years ago

TheBiv2• 12 years ago

A #16 seed has never beaten a #1 seed in the history of the tournament, yet the percentages of moving on for #1 seeds against #16 seeds vary from 96%-99%.

I wonder if there would be any of this variance (4 percentage points from 100%) if computers, without human input, were used to place the likelihood of moving on.

rabble• 12 years ago

Just because it's never happened doesn't mean that it won't happen, just as the percentage's suggest it's very unlikely.

AnimalMuppet• 12 years ago

I think TheBiv's point is that, even though you know it can happen, historical data suggests that 1-4% is too high a probability. It's never happened in, say, 20 years of a 64-team tournament? That's 80 #1 seeds? Then 1% might be a reasonable probability, but 4% does not seem reasonable.

streptomycin3• 12 years ago

There was a big variance in the regular season performances of the #1 seeds this year, which is what the computers are picking up on. If anything, I think humans have the opposite effect of what you suspect, as they do things like overrating Wichita St for emotional reasons (undefeated record) while the most famous computer ranking http://www.usatoday.com/sports/ncaab/sagarin/ puts Wichita St as only the 13th best team.

Also, historically #1 seeds were stronger than they are now because top players didn't go to the NBA so quickly.

Touche• 12 years ago

Also, historically #1 seeds were stronger than they are now because top players didn't go to the NBA so quickly.

Would love to see some data on that. My perception that it's been the same since the early 2000s.

selectodude• 12 years ago

I would say the exact opposite, really. Players can't jump straight from high school anymore. So you have a larger base of extremely talented freshmen.

Also, I would consider the Pomeroy rankings to be better (many more variables, Sagarin uses point differentials which are silly).

digikata• 12 years ago

What's often quoted in Warren Buffet's Billion dollar NCAA contest are the odds of randomly picking the perfect bracket of teams, but I have to think that Buffet's insurance actuaries actually calculated the odds of randomly selecting the right bracket with a millions of random guesses around a locus of likely guesses informed by analysis like the posted page (and from other stats analysis professionals.. vegas oddsmakers for example...). Otherwise the risk of taking that bet is actually much higher than a fully random pick, yes?

Edit: As it turns out, Warren Buffet, as usual, seems to have done his homework and even adds the interesting angle of "buying out" a possible winner partway through the contest:

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/03/bill...

jofer• 12 years ago

Similarly, this NPR article discusses that a bit: http://www.npr.org/2014/03/15/290283283/why-you-wont-win-war...

swanson• 12 years ago

I think I read somewhere that the fine-print states one entry per household, so no brute forcing :)

danvideo• 12 years ago

I find the discussion of their model much more interesting than the results: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nate-silvers-ncaa-basket...

ajstiles• 12 years ago

Silver's round-by-round projection percentages are included in the HTML source. If you like building rule-specific points projections, here's the data, extracted:

https://gist.github.com/ajstiles/06e2ac52927d3f292255

bpm140• 12 years ago

Florida has a higher percentage of winning every round than Louisville, but Louisville has a higher overall chance of winning the tourney.

What am I missing?

jaredmck• 12 years ago

They don't have as high a percentage of winning the final round - 15/24 vs 14/26

hansy• 12 years ago

Is this the first year Nate and his team have modeled the NCAA Tournament? I'd be curious to know if they applied a similar statistical approach last year and, if so, how that model faired against the actual tournament results.

FiveThirtyEight’s NCAA Tournament Predictions

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