Selection Sunday Is Here
Over the weekend, we here at the PiRate Ratings have been perusing all the statistical information relevant to our popular PiRate Bracket-picking criteria. What began as a simple back-testing exercise six years ago has evolved into a lengthy formula that has proven to be rather accurate at isolating the real contenders from the pretenders.
We have determined which factors are important and which are irrelevant when it comes to the NCAA Tournament. Last year, with about 1,150 readers coming to our site to read the pre-tournament prediction, we shocked a lot of Blue Mist fanatics by predicting that their beloved Wildcats would fail to reach the Final Four. We said the same thing about Kansas. It was a foregone conclusion that the Wildcats and Jayhawks were on a collision course to play in one of those games of the century.
We crunched the numbers and predicted Coach K and Duke to win the title. The choice was not popular. We were told, sometimes not in the King’s English, how stupid our formula must be to take a not-so-great Duke team (when compared to the really good Duke teams in the past), and how our formula was full of baloney. We had to laugh when one reader lambasted us using the same words he had used the year before when we tabbed North Carolina as a bigger favorite to win it all than Ronald Reagan was in the 1984 election.
For the record, we predicted Kansas and Memphis to make it to the finals in 2008, and we forecasted Florida and UCLA to meet for the championship in 2006. We also told you to watch out for tiny George Mason that year as they had a criteria score that made them a contender to advance to the Elite Eight.
We made a handful of West Virginia fans happy when we called for the Mountaineers to win four games and crash the Final Four party. We forecasted the Regional Final win over Kentucky before the play-in game tipped off. On the bright side, for some fans from the Bluegrass, we correctly predicted Murray State to upset Vanderbilt in the first round.
This formula has its drawbacks as well as its benefits. It is strictly a mechanical formula much like a stock screener. It does not consider a lot of the intangibles, such as emotion, motivation, and intestinal fortitude. Of course, it removes all the biases and looks only for the pertinent statistics that propelled past teams into the Final Four.
For instance, we missed on Butler last year. We called for UTEP to upset the Bulldogs in the first round in what we thought was the best overall matchup of the first two days. We missed on other first and second round games as well. We explicitly state that this formula is geared toward finding the teams that can advance to the Elite Eight and Final Four and finding the team that best emulates past champions.
Remember this: the 1927 New York Yankees, the best baseball team ever (better than the 1939 Yankees in our opinion), lost 44 games during the season. 28.6% of the time, an inferior team defeated the Bronx Bombers. There are 32 games in the first round, so a record of 23-9 should be considered as dominating as the 1927 Yankees.
Let’s say that the top predictors can successfully pick 80% of the tournament games correctly when filling out their brackets. Apply common mathematics to the 64 advancing teams after the First Four Round is played in Dayton, and that leaves you with 25.6 correct picks in the first round. That means that 6.4 of the teams you picked are gone, so you cannot win any more games involving those exited teams.
In the second round, if you are fortunate to pick 80% correctly once again, 10.24 of the Sweet 16 will be teams you picked to make it to the second week of the tournament. The other 5.76 teams still around are teams you did not pick, so they cannot help you in your brackets. Remember, this amount is about the high end of the threshold for the best prognosticators.
Applying our 80% success rate in the next two rounds, 4.1 of our teams will make the Elite Eight, and 1.64 of our teams will make the Final Four. You see just how difficult it can be to fill out your brackets. It really gives you a headache when the junior executive’s sweet little secretary wins the office pool because she chose her teams based on the number of syllables in their name. Pure luck sometimes wins over hard work. That’s life.
We can tell you one thing about this year’s probable NCAA Tournament field. It is not the most dominating field. We have yet to finish collecting all the data we need to put numbers to the criteria, but we can tell you that we expect more first round and second round games to be decided in the final minutes than most years. It makes for a great tournament to watch, but it makes for five headaches for the five of us to live up to our past successes.
Tonight, we will begin our NCAA Tournament coverage with a full explanation of our system. Beginning Monday, we will start to analyze each of the four regionals and tell you which teams have the best chance of advancing to Houston’s Reliant Stadium.
Let’s take a look at some unfinished business. There are four conference tournament championships on tap for today. One of them can cause a chain reaction and force the bottom team on the bubble into the NIT.
Atlantic Coast Conference—Greensboro, NC
#1 North Carolina (26-6) vs. #2 Duke (29-4)
1:00 PM EDT ESPN
It’s always great when the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox meet in the American League Playoffs. Well, it is great if you are not a fan of the other teams. The Big Two from Tobacco Road meet for a third time this season in the rubber game. It is the 30th time for both in the ACC Championship Game.
North Carolina blew a large lead at Cameron Indoor Stadium in February, but the Tar Heels breezed to a win at the Dean Dome last week to wrap up the regular season championship. Carolina has not lost since that game at Duke, and the Tar Heels are on a 14-1 streak since mid-January. It has not been easy for Coach Roy Williams and his team, as they have had to come back from double digit deficits in the second half of both of their tournament games.
Duke weathered a mighty scare when Nolan Smith went down with a toe injury in the quarterfinal game against Maryland, but Smith showed no signs that it affected him when he returned Saturday to score 27 points in an easy win over Virginia Tech.
This is definitely the game of the day as you prepare for the big announcements this evening. Flip a coin. This is a 50-50 affair. We’ll go with the Tar Heels because they looked better overall down the stretch than the Blue Devils, but we have no real reason to pick one rival over the other. It will come down to which team has a better shooting eye today and has the most rest.
Atlantic 10 Conference—Atlantic City, NJ
#3 Richmond (26-7) vs. #9 Dayton (22-12)
1:00 PM EDT CBS
Fans of Michigan State, Virginia Tech, Boston College, Southern Cal, Alabama, and other bubble teams will be rooting like crazy for the Spiders today. If Dayton upsets Richmond, the last team in the tournament will be exiled to the NIT.
Richmond has won six games in a row and 10 of 11. The Spiders have outscored their opponents by 12 points per game in their current streak, and their Princeton-style offense has really jelled down the stretch. Their defense has been as potent as their offense. In the last four games, opponents have connected on just 35.3% of their shots.
Dayton connected on just 34.4% of their shots in a nine-point home loss to Richmond in the regular season. The Flyers were in the middle of a 6-9 slide when they played Richmond in late January.
The Flyers came out flying in the A-10 Tournament. In the first two rounds, Dayton couldn’t miss from outside. Three-point barrages in both games gave the Flyers early double-digit leads. Yesterday, the shots did not fall, but the Flyers held on with defense.
We do not expect Dayton to jump out to a big lead today. In fact, we believe they will commit just enough errors for Richmond to exploit with their patient offense and help one bubble team stay alive.
Big Ten Conference—Indianapolis
#1 Ohio State (31-2) vs. #6 Penn State (19-13)
3:30 PM EDT CBS
If this were only football, we would call this the game of the day. Then, again, we would probably break out into a discussion about Joe Paterno and his squeaky clean history against Jim Tressel and his e-mail history.
On paper, this game looks like a mismatch, but in reality, Ohio State has not dominated this weekend, while Penn State has.
The Buckeyes are playing for the first overall seed. A loss today would give that honor to Kansas. Penn State appears to be in the Big Dance, but there is still a tiny pinhole of doubt. A loss would leave the Nittany Lions at 19-14.
Ohio State struggled all day against Northwestern’s slowdown. Penn State can slow this game down and play much better defense than the Wildcats. We believe the big underdog has a legitimate chance to win the title.
Southeastern Conference—Atlanta
#1E Florida (26-6) vs. #2E Kentucky (24-8)
1:00 PM EDT ABC
Florida does not need much help to win this game and move up as high as a number two seed. Kentucky’s lack of depth forced Coach John Calipari to stick with his starters long after he needed to do so yesterday, and two Wildcat starters exited the game with ankle injuries in the final minutes.
The worse of the two injuries belong to star Doron Lamb, and Lamb may or may not be available to play today. Florida’s offense forces defenders to cover a lot of territory, and Lamb will not be able to play defense the way it is needed to stop the Gators’ offense.
We look for the Gators to put this game away in the first five minutes of the second half.
Check back just before the brackets are announced tonight. We will have our bracket-picking primer online around 5:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time.
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