During the NCAA men's basketball tournament, teams with more balance perform better than those which excel in only one area of the game.
Tag - Bracketology
After a year without March Madness, the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective is excited to bring back our highly-anticipated 68 March Madness Facts article for the 2021 edition of the tournament. Here are some insights on every...
By William Ezekowitz Here’s a dirty little secret about March Madness. The difference between a bad bracket and a good bracket is skill, but the difference between a good bracket and a great bracket is luck. Anyone who has won...
by Will Ezekowitz It is important to remember that statistically predicting the NCAA tournament, despite what FiveThirtyEight and others may tell you, is largely a fool’s errand. Most of these games are close to coin tosses...
by Kurt Bullard After finishing the 2014 season 35-1 and running the table in the conference, Wichita State earned a one-seed to the dismay of mid-major haters around the country. The Shockers drew the No. 8 Kentucky in...
By Kurt Bullard With the brackets now set and Harvard cementing its status as an Ivy League dynasty with four straight NCAA Tournament bids, over 40 million people will begin to fill out brackets for the chance to win bragging...
For the past two years, I have worked on a model that predicts NCAA Tournament upsets using the gospel of tempo-free basketball stats, the Four Factors. Over that time, the model has gone a perfect six for six in predicting 11...
(Editor’s note: You can see the model’s 2012 1-68 rankings here and full bracket here) Every year, millions of Americans tune in to watch the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, colloquially known as March...
Below is my full Survival Model rankings for the NCAA tournament in 2012. The numbers are tough to interpret, but they represent the relative risk of failing (losing) at a given time period. Lower numbers represent better chances...
For the past two years, I have attempted to systematically predict First Round NCAA Tournament upsets using a dataset of match-ups from 2004 onward. Last year, I improved the model by adding opponent Four Factors data, and the...