NCAA Tournament Contest II - Brackets MUST be filled out by Thurs @ 12:20pm EST!!!

[Tps222]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

UAlbany all the way.

[Tasselfoot]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

Haha. Albany SHOULD win the... American East? Conference. #1 seed.

OSU... No way. Big Ten teams can only win on their home courts. As soon as they play a tough team without their home crowd, they crawl into the fetal position. Which is why a 4-loss in-conference team won the league out right. Pathetic that they are the #1 ranked conference based on RPI. How the Big East fell to 4th is beyond me (South Florida is single-handedly killing the RPI, at #227)... UConn and Nova are #1/2 in both polls and #2/3 in RPI, with Nova within .01 of Duke for #1.

[Tasselfoot]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

Selection Sunday is today.... you'll be able to fill out your brackets starting tonight.

[Tasselfoot]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

Fill out your brackets! Tourney starts Thursday at noon EST. Must be filled out before then.

[banditcom]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

I filled out my first one this morning while dead tired and not caring.. haha

I'll make more, since you have 5 filled out.

[talisman]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

I'll fill out mine tomorrow after I'm done with exams.

Should be interesting, seeing as how I haven't been following basketball at all this year.

[MilfeulleSakuraba]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

Finished mine.

Shame I couldn't get another Duke/BC game, I want Boston College to get revenge.

Also I find it funny that we could very well have a UConn/Washington game.

[talisman]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

almost done. all five are guaranteed to suck, too.

[Tasselfoot]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

no shot in hell washington makes it past the sweet 16. They are amazingly over-rated. I have them losing to utah state in at least 2 of my brackets.

my bracket #1 and #2 are identical, except I have the 2 teams playing in the finals reversed... #3, #4, #5 are more laden with upsets. #1/#2 are what I think will happen, with #1 being what I feel to be my best and most honest bracket.

[HansSky]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

How about I just make one and beat all 4,000 of yours?

Okay.

[Tasselfoot]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

Ha.

Go for it.

[Kilgamayan]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

Washington has no shot at the Elite 8 because they run into UConn on the way there, not because they're overrated. >_>

[drummerlsu]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

I just entered 3 of mine.

[Tasselfoot]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

Excellent. About 38 hours left to fill in your brackets. Don't forget that Monmouth just beat Hampton in the play-in game!



PS - I'm really bored... so if you wanted to guarentee a perfect bracket, you'd need to make 2^55 of them (2^63, but we'll give the 1 and 2 seeds a free pass in round 1, which is 8 gimme games, as those seeds are 164-4 over 21 years), or 36,028,797,018,963,968 (~36 quadrillion).

We could add in other stipulations, like seeds over a 6 won't make the final 4 (only happened 4 times out of 84 final 4 teams. 8th seed Nova, 8th seed UNC, 8th seed Wisconsin, 11th seed LSU). That would eliminate 32 teams of the 56 from reaching the final 4, or:

32/56 (.571) * 31/55 (.564) * 30/54 (.556) * 29/53 (.547) = .098
32/56 (.571) * 31/55 (.564) * 30/54 (.556) * 24/53 (.453) = .081 * 4 = .324
32/56 (.571) * 31/55 (.564) * 24/54 (.444) * 23/53 (.434) = .062 * 6 = .372
32/56 (.571) * 24/55 (.436) * 23/54 (.426) * 22/53 (.415) = .044 * 4 = .176

That is 97% of all brackets. Aka, only 3% of all brackets would have:

24/56 * 23/55 * 22/54 * 21/53 = .030 * 36,028,797,018,963,968 = ~1,080,000,000,000,000 or 1 quadrillion.

So, yea.... trying to pick a perfect bracket is basically impossible. Even if you could pick the 55 non 100% games with 90% accuracy, you would only pick a perfect bracket .3% of the time, or once every 333 brackets. Needless to say, nobody picks all games at 90% accuracy.

If anyone wants to work with the statistics more, be my guest... my knowledge of stats is not all that extensive, and I'm not even sure my workings of the elimination of the 7-14 seeds from final 4 contention is correct (in fact, I'd guess its wrong).



The more realistic bracket strategy, IMO, would be to pick all favorites in the 1st round (plus 9 and 10 seeds. Drops it to 2^39). You'd be accepting 87 losses in 504 games, or 17.3%, or about 4 games @ 10 points each. Then pick all 1 and 2 seeds in the 2nd plus 3/6 and 4/5 (Dropping the 7/8/9/10). You'd lose some games, but 264 wins and 72 losses is not bad (21.4%, or about 2 games @ 20 points each). Then you pick all combos for the sweet 16 and beyond of 1-6. In that case, you're only going to lose 23 games in 21 years, or 1 a year @ 40 points. For the Elite 8, it is 4 teams ever, or 1 every 5 years. And only 1 seed higher than a 6 has ever made the Finals and the same team won the whole thing (8th seed Nova in 1985). So, under this formula, you'd lose 120 points out of 1680, for a final score of 1560... which is almost certainly enough to win the grand prize.

The only problem is... I'm not sure how many brackets you'd need to fill out. I think it would be 2^(39 - 16) (aka, 2^23) * 2^4 (aka, 16... as there are 16 variations of brackets involving the 7/8/9/10 in round 1, but then none after, which is why we subtract 16 from the 2^x calculation, but multiply back in 16). That would be 2^27, or 134,217,728 (134.2 million). Much easier than 1 quadrillion, but still pretty impractical.

Even having 100 people making 1.3 million brackets each, it would take 260,000 accounts for each person, and at least 2 minutes to fill out each bracket. Not nearly enough time. *sigh*. Plus, the time is not nearly worth the $10,000 prize.

But it sure is fun to think about it... and again, I hope someone will correct my statistics.

[drummerlsu]

Re: NCAA Tournament Contest II

My calculation of removing all but 1-6 seeds from final four consideration, including elimination of 16 and 15 seed upsets:

Taking an individual quarter of the bracket (mini-bracket) of 16 teams, we have 13 total games in question. Next we assume the #1 seed will win all their games. If we wanted to fill out this mini-bracket perfect, we'd have to guess the outcome of 10 games (3 of the 13 are already known, the #1 seed will win). This would be 2^10 brackets, or 1024. If we assumed #2 would win the mini-bracket instead, that's also 1024 combinations. But if we chose any other seeded team to win then we'd only be guessing the outcome of 9 games because 4 of the 13 games are already known (an extra first round game known). This is 2^9 (512) combinations for each seed below 2.

So the total number of mini-bracket combos excluding seeds 7-14 from winning is 2*1024 + 4*512 = 4096. This is out of 8192 possible combos (2*1024 + 12*512).

The total number of full brackets needed assuming seeds 7-14 are excluded from the final four is (4096^4)(2^3) = 2,251,799,814,000,000. About twice as many as you had figured. This comes from taking each mini-bracket combo from each of the four regions, and multiplying it by the number of combos in the 3 final four games.

If we allowed the 7-14 to be considered for the final four, we would get the original number (8192^4)(2^3) = 36,028,797,020,000,000.

Ugh that was painful.

EDIT: It would be interesting to see how far we could minimize the number of brackets we'd have to fill out in order to have say a 5-10% chance of having a perfect bracket, accounting for histories of upset likelihood. Maybe this could be done by analyzing exactly which upsets in which rounds would be the most beneficial to exclude from our entry set. Are there any good sites that analyze historical performance based on seed in different rounds?