Bracketology for Data Junkies
March Madness is here, and my productivity is already suffering (case in point: here I am blogging about March Madness in the middle of my workday). 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 the various matchups. One risk in this strategy is that the rankings 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 in some cases. Finally, the tournament seeds and rankings are driven – in a way – by the collective opinions of a crowd, 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 taken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seedings, 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, etc., and 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:
DIY Analysis
Today I found a pretty nifty online tool called Bracket Brains for analyzing all the tournament matchups. If you pay them $15, you can save any analysis you do, and you get a bunch of other features, but you can also get a lot of utility out of it for free. It incorporates a Hot-or-Not style picker like the Yahoo Team Ranker, but 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 the 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 traveled by each team to the game venue. As you tinker with all these parameters, you can watch the projected outcome of the matchup in question change in real time.
