Ah, March. Spring is springing, the clocks have been turned forward, and at offices all across the country, people who’ve never seen a college basketball game are earnestly discussing Kansas’s starting five, and wondering why Kentucky got such a tough bracket.
Yes, it’s NCAA basketball tournament time, and that means it’s time to enter your office pool. We’ve got a different way of looking at the field of 64 teams, one that just might help you bring home the prize.
Here’s the idea: Generally, most people’s picks in tournament pools look pretty similar — after a while, you start to have consensus. For instance, the millions of users in ESPN’s online pool almost all think that the top four seeds will win their first game (and they’re almost certainly right, as a top seed has never lost to a 16 seed in the first round).
But you can look at each round, and each game, and see the percentage of players who’ve picked which winner. Call it the wisdom of the crowd, which is pretty darn good. Even with the unpredictability of the tournament, the crowd’s consensus picks usually finish in the 80th percentile or so.
That’s not good enough to win your pool, though. You need to be looking for teams that the crowd is undervaluing, or overvaluing. That’s what we’ve done in the chart below:
Here’s what those numbers mean. They’re the difference between the crowd’s pick at ESPN, and the statistical predictions of two top college basketball analysts: Ken Pomeroy, and Jeff Sagarin. Both sets of ratings can be used to calculate a team’s expected chance to reach a certain round of the tournament.
I’ve then taken the two ratings and averaged them together, and then compared them with the ESPN percentages. A positive number means that the stats say a team is more likely to win than the crowd thinks; negative means that the stats say they’re more likely to lose than the crowd thinks.
Games that have more than a 10 percent difference are highlighted — green showing teams that are good bets compared to the crowd, and red showing bad bets.
So, you’ll see that most of the top seeds are highly inflated, especially Kentucky. Kansas is also overvalued by the crowd, although they are still the statistical guys favorite to win it all. It’s just that 38.8 percent of ESPN users are picking the Jayhawks as national champs, while the statheads peg them with a 27.6 percent chance. But Duke isn’t getting much respect from the crowd, and might be a good pick.
Three teams jump out to me as very undervalued by the masses — Wisconsin, Brigham Young, and Florida State. Objective ratings give Wisconsin a 28.9 percent chance of reaching the Elite 8, while only 6.8 percent of ESPN users have picked them to do so. That’s a big gap, and one you might be able to exploit.
The single biggest gap between the two sets of picks? Old Dominion in its first-round matchup against Notre Dame. Only 14.9 percent of ESPN users have picked ODU to knock off the higher-seeded Irish, while the stats actually make them a slight favorite, at 50.85 percent.
As I wrote last year, this is a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Stick with the crowd and you probably won’t win, although you likely won’t finish last. But since most pools only pay for the top few slots, you might as well go for it, right?
Chris Wilson has a story up on Slate, an update of one he did last year, that covers some similar ground to this — it’s a good read, so check it out.
The complete Google Docs spreadsheet is available, so you can see the math. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions, and how you do in your pool!
Photo: Kentucky guard John Wall (11) scores against Tennessee during the second half of an NCAA college basketball semifinal round game at the Southeastern Conference tournament on Saturday, March 13, 2010, in Nashville, Tennesse. Kentucky won 74-45.
Associated Press/Wade Payne
; ?>/images/envelope.gif){kind=small}
