College profs dope out NCAA tourney selection, brackets

bracket predictions

I’m beginning to get e-mails from folks who contend they can predict what the NCAA tournament selection committee with do come Sunday and also from those who say they have effective formulas for filling out tournament brackets.
Well, there will be no endorsements of bracket “systems” here, folks, but I’ll pass along the ones that appear to have some merit or/and interest.
First, we’ll deal with Selection Sunday. I have a news release from Mercer University, which has campuses throughout the state of Georgia. Mercer economics professor Allen Lynch and University of North Florida professor Jay Coleman have come up with models for predicting both the at-large teams for the tournament selection (the Dance Card) and for predicting brackets (the Score Card).
Over the course of several years, the Dance Card accuracy rate has been around 93 percent.
The latest predictions are based on games that only go up to March 11, so it’s a little dated at the moment but here it is.
The Score Card model is pretty complicated, so I’ll just quote from the news release:
“The Score Card formula suggests that only four pieces of information about each team are related to performance in the tournament: RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) value (i.e., the “old” RPI value); the ranking of the conference the team comes from (using the non-conference RPI ranking of each conference); whether the team won its regular season conference championship; and the number of wins in the last 10 games.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “College profs dope out NCAA tourney selection, brackets”

  1. Lorin says on March 17th, 2008 at 5:27 am :

    This is hardly a “prediction.”

  2. Melba says on March 17th, 2008 at 6:18 am :

    What’s the candle jack meme? I don’t think I’ve ever hea

  3. Denver says on March 17th, 2008 at 7:08 am :

    There’s a world of difference between unfalsifiable and unfalsified you lying jackass.

  4. Francis says on March 17th, 2008 at 7:59 am :

    I think Hawking radiation is extremely likely, but it is still unproven. And yes, black holes are not magical sucking machines - but if you drop one into the Earth and it manages to gain the teeniest bit of mass, it will turn the planet into Swiss cheese (before devouring it entirely). I think the LHC is pretty safe, safe enough to operate, but there is still a very small chance that it will KILL US ALL. Either way, I’m for it.

  5. Wayland says on March 17th, 2008 at 8:49 am :

    Interesting, but it’s still a computer simulation - meaning there are things that are possibly and very probably not accounted for. I can’t believe this guy actually cited his own work as proof something existed.

  6. London says on March 17th, 2008 at 9:40 am :

    didnt they do this back in 97? with the whole deep space portal to hell and all? i thought they had learned their lesson…

  7. Gaylord says on March 17th, 2008 at 10:30 am :

    Mayb

  8. Anneka says on March 17th, 2008 at 11:21 am :

    We might trust simulations more when they can forcast the weather correctly.

  9. Morgen says on March 17th, 2008 at 12:12 pm :

    People always say this, but a black hole is not some magical sucking machine–it has only as much gravity as the matter that went into making it (actually a bit less due to the inverse square law).It’s not as if hawking radiation is some wild-eyed idea, it is based on the very real, observable, Casimir effect. Virtual particles do pop out of the vacuum energy and annihilate themselves by joining back together. If you set up a boundary (like an event horizon) that prevents them from re-joining and annihilating themselves, one of them will float away. That is hawking radiation.