Bracketology for Data Junkies
March 18th, 2008 – 11:42 pmMarch Madness has arrived, and my workplace productivity is already suffering a little (sorry Jenny - I promise I’ll get all my stuff done). I’ve started working on my bracket and looking around the Internetz for a little help. I don’t know whether to trust the wisdom of crowds, the experts or my own careful analysis. There are resources on the web to support each of these strategies, and I thought I’d write up a quick survey…
Crowdsourcing your picks
Yahoo Sports has a new application called the “Team Ranker” that’s sort of like a Hot-or-Not for evaluating possible matchups. The theory is that the masses will collectively gravitate toward the most likely outcome. The obvious risk is that the Team Ranker application might be dominated by people who know nothing about college basketball and make their picks more or less at random. Fanboys might be a problem too. Duke, for example, has a lot of haters, so no matter how viable a contender they might be, I would worry about people expressing their desires (e.g. for Duke to lose) instead of their predictions. Finally, the official tournament seeds and rankings are themselves driven - in a way and in part - by a collection of opinions, so even if Yahoo’s Team Ranker is dominated by true college basketball aficionados, I would expect the results to follow the seeds.
Turning to the Experts
I’ve done well with this strategy in past tournaments, but it’s not a sure bet. Ttaken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seedings, and they inevitably split on all the toss-up games, so you still have to use your gut to a certain extent. The other challenge is that the expert commentary you can find is pretty disjointed. There are a lot of bits and pieces out there - separate breakdowns by region and conference, lots of hypothetical head-to-head matchups and riffs on narrow subjects like “injuries to watch - so it’s difficult to synthesize it into any kind of cohesive set of picks. That said, the free resources I tend to look at are the obvious ones:
Each of these sites has its stable of pundits who crank out a furious stream of blog posts and articles between the time the field of 64 is announced and the first tip-off. The trick is to sift through the noise and spot the nuggets that can help you. Most of all, I look for predictions - especially whole brackets.
DIY Analysis
This is an especially rich area this year, and I found a number of nifty online tools. One called Bracket Brains lets you dive deep into individual matchups. If you pay them $15, you can save your work, and you get a bunch of other features, but the free version gives you a taste. Matchup by matchup, it provides a whole range of parameters you can tinker with to help you make your picks.
You can adjust how you think various slices of things like recent performance, strength of schedule and Vegas spread will factor in to each matchup. You can look at similar matchups from past tournaments (based on the parameters you set). You can even view a map showing the distance each team will travel to the game venue. As you tinker with all these parameters, the projected outcome of the matchup in question changes in real time.
Another tool called Bracket Caster runs simulations based on each team’s past performance and calculated chances of winning against any other team. According to the description, every possible tournament game has been simulated one play at a time and repeated 10,000 times. Using this data, you can run your own simulations of the regional brackets, or look at a high-level analysis of any individual matchup.
Finally, March Madness is fertile territory for stat-obsessed geeks. One category of basketball statistics - efficiency - has become especially popular as a way to measure any team’s true merit and predict its performance in future games.
A team’s offensive efficiency is defined simply as points scored per 100 possessions. Defensive efficiency is points allowed per 100 possessions. Defining a “possession” is somewhat more complicated, and I’ll spare you the details (go here if you’re interested). A Sports Illustrated blogger named Luke Winn has produced a compelling examination of just how good a predictor efficiency is, which is nicely summed up as follows: “From 2004-07, only two teams outside the top 49 in defensive efficiency made the Elite Eight, and zero teams outside the top 25 made the Final Four.”
OK, back to work now.
Tags: college basketball, March Madness, sports, statistics