The teams that play on Saturday are the survivors of the wild opening day of this year’s NCAA men’s tournament. No matter how many harmonic means, linear regressions and bootstrapped standard errors we applied to the data, we couldn’t find a way to make it say Saturday’s games would be as thrilling as Thursday’s were. […]
As my boss, Nate Silver, wrote in his introduction to FiveThirtyEight’s March Madness predictions, 2014-15 was not a college basketball season defined by parity. For starters, Kentucky enters the bracket undefeated and — according to the Simple Rating System (SRS) — is the strongest pre-tournament team that the NCAA has seen in a while: But […]
As my boss, Nate Silver, wrote in his introduction to FiveThirtyEight’s March Madness predictions, 2014-15 was not a college basketball season defined by parity. For starters, Kentucky enters the bracket undefeated and — according to the Simple Rating System (SRS) — is the strongest pre-tournament team that the NCAA has seen in a while: But […]
On the surface, there isn’t much difference between FiveThirtyEight’s NCAA bracket and the consensus. Our most probable Final Four — Florida, Arizona, Michigan State and Louisville — are the same teams favored by the plurality of participants in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge. (They’re also the four teams President Obama chose for his bracket.) But there’s disagreement […]
On the surface, there isn’t much difference between FiveThirtyEight’s NCAA bracket and the consensus. Our most probable Final Four — Florida, Arizona, Michigan State and Louisville — are the same teams favored by the plurality of participants in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge. (They’re also the four teams President Obama chose for his bracket.) But there’s disagreement […]
