By Marty Gordon
NRVsports@ourvalley.org
March Madness is affecting millions of people throughout the country, and there is not a cure for the ailment. Everyone is looking for the perfect NCAA men’s basketball bracket. The question is how they will pick it.
Some will just pick their favorite teams. Others will go with the mascot from each school, while others might look at the numbers on this case the analytics.
A sports media class at Virginia Tech is hoping the latter will work for them. Award-winning broadcaster Bill Roth has been teaching the class for a number of years and hopes it will be known as an expert in the field of “bracketology.”
“This is a fun time of the year, and Virginia Tech is quickly becoming the national expert in this area,” Roth said. He compared this process as being similar to schools that predict the presidential election.
“Analytics” looks at meaningful patterns in data. The class looked at strength of schedule, road gains, scoring offense and scoring defense. The NCAA selection committee used the same information to decide the seedings this past week.
According to the American Gaming Association, roughly 70 million brackets are filled out each year. They estimated that 40 million Americans take part in predicting the NCAA Tournament.
Those seeking the perfect bracket are slim and none, but according to ESPN.com who runs on the largest online bracket contests, 550 people out of 17.3 million that filled out brackets on the site correctly picked the Final Four last season.
Roth told the class to consider other facts about “March Madness”:
Average of 13 upsets per year.
Top offensive team has made the Final Four just once in the 34 years.
A seventh seed or lower has made the Final Four every year since 2013 and seven of the last eight years. (Last year, Loyola Chicage. In 2017, South Carolina and in 2016, Syracuse.)
This is the third year, Roth’s class has made the predictions. With 100 enrolled in the program, the variance has been made on percentages.
“The analysis has become a great tradition at Virginia Tech,” Roth said.
Last year, the class predicted UVA as the overall winner. “There was an unusual abnormality as the data pointed to them winning it, but they got beat,” he said.
Roth said analytics is a growing field, and sometimes the analysis works and sometimes it doesn’t.
When all the data was punched and the numbers run, the Virginia Tech class predicted a Final Four of Duke, Gonzaga, Tennessee and North Carolina.
Yes, they also picked a winner, but Roth would not unveil the final champion keeping us guessing on whether the data or simply luck will win out.
