A year ago, it seemed like the NCAA Tournament’s era of parity was under attack. Kentucky had just wrapped up an undefeated regular season and was looking so powerful that the FiveThirtyEight model assigned the Wildcats a 41 percent probability of winning the tourney before it even began. (By comparison, most pre-tournament favorites of recent […]
UPDATE (6:30 p.m. March 18): We’ve updated this post to add information about the excitement index. Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts of the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments. We’ve been issuing probabilistic March Madness forecasts in some form since 2011, when FiveThirtyEight was just a couple of us writing for The New York Times. While […]
UPDATE (6:30 p.m. March 18): We’ve updated this post to add information about the excitement index. Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts of the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments. We’ve been issuing probabilistic March Madness forecasts in some form since 2011, when FiveThirtyEight was just a couple of us writing for The New York Times. While […]
Perfect brackets: They’re rather hard. You know this. Before we get into the whole “you have a one-in-who-gives-a-craptillion chance of winning” part of the story, though, let’s talk about why it’s so hard to grasp big numbers like this. Generally speaking, without a way to anchor a number to an everyday concept, people tend to […]
