2010 NCAA Tournament Thoughts

An alternative title to this blog entry would be “Why my calculator picked Washington, Wofford, and UTEP to the Sweet Sixteen and why you should believe it,” but that seemed a bit too wordy. In any event I can’t pretend that my personal picks are any more interesting or accurate than what my calculator thinks, so for the most part I’ll focus on what it thinks rather than what I think.

Before we get any farther, an explanation is in order. In 2006 I was taking a Statistics class in high school and we had an assignment for the NCAA Tournament: Devise a formula to predict winners for the NCAA Tournament games and use it to pick a bracket. I made up a formula taking into account only seed and record (the actual formula will remain a secret), and it did awfully well. And when I say awfully well, I mean it picked George Mason to make the Final Four. No big deal. It also picked other upsets such as Northwestern State, Bradley (I think even to the Sweet Sixteen), and UW-Milwaukee, not to mention getting the entire Final Four correct except for Florida (I had Boston College going on to win the whole thing). In the words of my legendary teacher J.B. Hanson, “You could have made a heck of a lot of money if you knew where to put it.” Obviously I chalk my success up to pure skill and my calculator knowing what it’s talking about, not just luck or anything.

Basically I input the formula which determines the probability that the favorite will win, and my calculator chooses the winner based on that probability. For instance, my calculator says Purdue has a 77.0% chance of defeating Siena, so 77% of the time it will give me a 1 (Purdue win) and 23% of the time it will give me a 0 (Siena win). My calculator fails to recognize that Robbie Hummel tore his ACL, or still refuses to believe it so that is not taken into account here. So this season I repeated the method and got some more interesting results:

-North Texas over Kansas St. in what will be the 5th time ever a 15 seed wins its first round game.
-Houston over Maryland and San Diego State over Tennessee in the Midwest.
-Washington, Cornell, Wofford, and Montana all win their first round games in the East Region, in what I have to imagine will be the first time ever the 11, 12, 13, and 14 seeds all win in one region. This leads to the Wofford and Washington Sweet Sixteen picks. Washington will go on to beat Clemson there, while Wofford’s Cinderella story is ended by Kentucky, who will beat Washington to make the Final Four.
-Kansas, Syracuse and Villanova join Kentucky in the Final Four in what turns out to be a vanilla ending to a flavorful bracket.
-Villanova defeats Kansas in the final despite only having a 29.2% chance to win that game.

In all honesty this method does lead to some interesting brackets. Unfortunately it gives you the 11/12/13/14 upsets and George Mason to the Final Four every so often but those are picks that nobody in their right mind would pick themselves, and the beauty of the NCAA Tournament is that anything can happen.

As for my own picks, I have Minnesota, Washington, and Cornell as my big first round upsets. Brigham Young over Kansas State, Minnesota over Pittsburgh, and Louisville over Duke comprise my second round upsets. I take Butler over Syracuse in the Sweet Sixteen and Butler, Ohio State, Kentucky, and Baylor to make the Final Four, with Kentucky outscoring Evan Turner 80-75 in the final. Kentucky will also beat Ohio State as a team by the same score to bring home the title.