A 13-year-old in Illinois. A 47-year-old English woman. A 70-year-old Vegas oddsmaker. At first blush, there isn’t much linking them. But last year, all three were among the most successful March Madness prognosticators. That’s where the similarities end. With methods ranging from gut instinct to computational learning theory, these three characters demonstrate just how wide […]
Many schools obtained a bid to the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, but the vast majority of schools did not. I went to one of the latter. In keeping with the tradition of trolling the small schools that did in fact make it in, it’s time to play the game of Where The Hell […]
Twenty years ago this week, Kentucky beat Syracuse in the men’s NCAA Tournament title game in front of a crowd of 19,229 at Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey. It was the last time the Final Four was held in a basketball arena. From 1997 through 2008, the Final Four was played in domed stadiums […]
Twenty years ago this week, Kentucky beat Syracuse in the men’s NCAA Tournament title game in front of a crowd of 19,229 at Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey. It was the last time the Final Four was held in a basketball arena. From 1997 through 2008, the Final Four was played in domed stadiums […]
Ahead of Saturday’s Final Four matchup between Villanova and Oklahoma, our prediction model had the Wildcats only slightly favored, with a 54 percent chance of winning, and nearly a quarter of the game was as tight as that probability suggests. When Oklahoma led 17-16 after eight minutes, our in-game win probabilities listed the odds as […]
