Improved NCAA Basketball Tournament Modeling via Point Spread and Team Strength Information

@article{Carlin1996ImprovedNB,
  title={Improved NCAA Basketball Tournament Modeling via Point Spread and Team Strength Information},
  author={Bradley P. Carlin},
  journal={The American Statistician},
  year={1996},
  volume={50},
  pages={39-43}
}
  • B. Carlin
  • Published 1996
  • Mathematics
  • The American Statistician
Abstract Several models for estimating the probability that a given team in an NCAA basketball tournament emerges as the regional champion were presented by Schwertman, Mc-Cready, and Howard. In this article we improve these probability models by taking advantage of external information concerning the relative strengths of the teams and the point spreads available at the start of the tournament for the first round games. The result is a collection of regional championship probabilities that are… 
View via Publisher
sph.umn.edu
73 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
14
Background Citations
26
Methods Citations
25
Results Citations
4

Tables from this paper

73 Citations

A logistic regression/Markov chain model for NCAA basketball
TLDR
Over the past 6 years, the combined logistic regression/Markov chain model has been significantly more successful than the other common methods such as tournament seedings, the AP and ESPN/USA Today polls, the RPI, and the Sagarin and Massey ratings.
Identifying and Evaluating Contrarian Strategies for NCAA Tournament Pools
The annual NCAA men’s basketball tournament inspires many individuals to wager money in office and online pools that require entrants to predict the outcome of every game prior to the tournament’s…
March Madness and the Office Pool
TLDR
This work considers the structure of single elimination tournaments, and shows how to efficiently calculate the mean and the variance of the number of correctly predicted wins (or more generally the total points earned in an office pool) for a given slate of predicted winners.
Team assignments and scheduling for the NCAA basketball tournament
TLDR
This paper describes the development of an integer program designed to optimize team assignments in the sense of minimizing the distance travelled by teams to game sites and the corresponding travel costs and demonstrates the usefulness of the model in both operational and strategic business decisions.
Late-Game Reversals in Professional Basketball, Football, and Hockey
Abstract Empirical evidence suggests that in basketball, football, and hockey, the leader at the beginning of the final period (quarter or period) wins the game about 80% of the time. We discuss…
Forecasting NBA basketball playoff outcomes using the weighted likelihood
TLDR
The weighted likelihood-based method is addressed and it is shown how it could have been used to predict the 96/97 NBA playoff results and proves to be quite accurate.
Contrarian Strategies for NCAA Tournament Pools: A Cure for March Madness?
Every March, the National Collegiate Athletic Association selects 65 Division I men’s basketball teams to compete in a single-elimination tournament to determine a single national champion. Due to…
How To Play O ce Pools If You Must Maximizing Expected Gain In Tournament Models
The increasing attention paid in recent years to the annual NCAA men s basketball tour nament seems due at least in part to the proliferation of o ce pools which follow tournament outcomes Such pools…
NCAA Tournament Games: The Real Nitty-Gritty
The NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee annually selects its national championship tournament's at-large invitees, and assigns seeds to all participants. As part of its deliberations, the…
Predicting the Outcomes of NCAA Basketball Championship Games
This paper uses the difference in seeding ranks to predict the outcome of March Madness games. It updates the Boulier-Stekler method by predicting the outcomes by rounds. We also use the consensus…
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 12 REFERENCES
Choice models for predicting divisional winners in major league baseball
TLDR
This work uses a generalized choice model for the probability of a team winning a particular game that allows for different strengths for each team, different home advantages, and strengths varying randomly with time to predict division winners of major league baseball.
More Probability Models for the NCAA Regional Basketball Tournaments
Abstract In this department The American Statistician publishes articles, reviews, and notes of interest to teachers of the first mathematical statistics course and of applied statistics courses. The…
Predictions for National Football League Games via Linear-Model Methodology
Abstract Results on mixed linear models were used to develop a procedure for predicting the outcomes of National Football League games. The predictions are based on the differences in score from past…
Estimation with Selected Binomial Information or do you Really Believe that Dave Winfield is Batting .471
Abstract Often sports announcers, particularly in baseball, provide the listener with exaggerated information concerning a player's performance. For example, we may be told that Dave Winfield, a…
The Cold Facts about the “Hot Hand” in Basketball
You're in a world all your own. It's hard to describe. But the basket seems to be so wide. No matter what you do, you know the ball is going to go in. –Purvis Short, of the NBA's Golden State…
Did Shoeless Joe Jackson Throw the 1919 World Series
Abstract Joe Jackson and seven other White Sox were banned from major league baseball for throwing the 1919 World Series. This article examines the validity of Jackson's banishment with respect to…
Teaching Bayesian Statistics Using Sampling Methods and MINITAB
TLDR
The use of Rubin's Sampling-Importance-Resampling (SIR) algorithm is illustrated to simulate posterior distributions for three inference problems and the use of MINITAB macros is presented to illustrate the ease of performing this simulation on standard statistical computer programs.
On a Measure of the Information Provided by an Experiment
On the Probability of Winning a Football Game
Abstract Based on the results of the 1981, 1983, and 1984 National Football League seasons, the distribution of the margin of victory over the point spread (defined as the number of points scored by…
It's Okay to Believe in the “Hot Hand”
...
...