It’s that time of the year where 68 National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball teams will compete in 63 games over the next several weeks to see who becomes the 2019 NCAA basketball champion, also known as March Madness. Many people love to watch collegiate basketball during March Madness because the games are often fast paced and played with passion. However, one of the largest components of March Madness excitement is the mathematical estimation and unpredictability of it. Below is more info about how math and March Madness are frienimies.
To start, the basic notion of March Madness is that there are 68 teams who enter from 32 different conferences. Before March Madness starts, all conferences have tournaments that lead to a winner of the conference. Those winners then get to move onto March Madness. The other 36 teams are chosen by a selection committee that gives them to teams they feel are the most deserving. The teams are then split into four regions of 16 teams and the top ranked team in each region plays the 16thranked team from that same region. Next the second ranked team plays the 15thranked team, so on so forth. The winners of each of those games move on to the next round and then the next and then the next, until there is only one team standing.
Now let’s talk about how math and March Madness are intertwined, which starts with brackets. Brackets are the basic structure used by those trying to guess who will win. They are something that’s filled out either with pen/pencil and paper or online and they predict the outcome of each game in the tournament. Brackets are then one giant statistics chart. Similar to Fantasy Football, some people enter pools with other people and bet on the outcome and their bracket predictions. Predictions are then compared against others in the pool and whoever has the most accurate guesses wins that pool.
Seems easy, right? Think again. While the idea of predicting some accurate outcomes isn’t complicated, the accuracy of a 100% correct prediction is very, very unlikely. So unlikely that you are more likely to win Powerball twice or be struck by lightning 4 times (Smithsonian, 2019). Theprobability of a perfect bracket is so low that in 2014, Warren Buffet offered a billion dollars to anyone who could pull it off. We aren’t sure if that bet is still on the table, butnobody won that bet, or ever has (NY Times, 2018). If you were to pick totally randomly, the probability of picking a perfect March Madness bracket is 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
Now that we know it’s unlikely to select a perfect bracket by randomly selecting teams, the question is, is there anything we can do to improve the scores. Similar to fantasy football, you may be more likely to have more accuracy in predicting brackets if you understand the sport and follow college basketball. For example, most people who create March Madness brackets and use them to bet can consider it safe for the first top 3 teams to beat the bottom 3 teams. Many of them also might do their research on those that were chosen by the committee and wager based on how well those teams performed throughout the rest of the season. Surely nobody will look at all games and think there’s a 100% chance of winning, but for every game you can reliably pick correctly, your probability of being correct further along in the bracket increases. In other words, if you make some educated guesses that turn out to be right with the first set of games, you have a much higher chance of being right later on as the games continue.
Outside of just choosing teams based off of winning percentage, it’s also advised to use statistics based on the ranking of teams played, when and where the games were played, and the number of points that were scored in each game by the winning and losing team. For instance, you might take all the points a team scores in the whole season and compare them to the total points another team headed into March Madness scores throughout their season. Or you might take total the number of points a team loses by in every game lost during the season, average it and do this with other teams to compare who has on average the highest number of points lost by. That’s A LOT of statistics! With so many combination and statistics that can be measured, it’s no wonder why no one person has quite figured out the magic equation to 100% accurately predict March Madness.
You might find it easier to list the first 1,000 numbers in pi than accurately predict March Madness, but that shouldn’t stop you from taking a 1 in 9.2 quintillion shot at a perfect guess!
Want to learn more about how we would come up for statistics for predicting our March Madness brackets? Come in and see us at Mathnasium of Parker!
