March Madness

March madness is in the air, and for a K-Stater like me, it means something all together different: it's March and I'm mad. And I'm mad because my Wildcats are, once again, watching the action from the comfort of their couches. I wouldn't say I'm disappointed as much as I am frustrated with what's become the status quo.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy the tournament as much as the next person, and look forward to it each year. I enjoy the big wins, the amazing individual performances (I'm talking to you, Cole Aldrich), the upsets and all of the hoopla surrounding it. I also enjoy the quirky little stories that come out every year, like this one that was posted last week on 60-Second Science:

The NCAA men's basketball "March Madness" tournament may have just tipped off, but one academic is already thinking about the later rounds. Once the "Elite Eight" teams emerge, says Sheldon Jacobson, a professor of computer science and the director of the simulation and optimization laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, throw out a team's initial seeding—it's no better than flipping a coin to figure out their chances of winning.

So, statistically, once a team reaches the quarterfinals, each one has basically the same chance of winning it all. The basic idea here is that seeding matters when you're comparing 15 or 16 seeds to 1 or 2 seeds, but for the top three seeds in each region, there's not really a statistical difference in terms of who has the best chance to win it all. Other researchers, though, have devised models based on probability that attempt to make predictions with a remarkable amount of success:

The tournament's notorious unpredictability didn't stop Joel Sokol, a Georgia Tech operations research professor whose statistical model correctly selected last year's Final Four, championship game and overall tournament winner (the University of Kansas Jayhawks), from developing his own computer program. His picks? The University of North Carolina Tar Heels, University of Pittsburgh Panthers, University of Louisville Cardinals, and University of Memphis Tigers will make the Final Four [...](Michigan State and Oklahoma are ranked too high and due for an upset, statistically speaking, he added.)

So the good news (according to Jacobson) for all you Hawk fans is that KU, with one more win, has (statistically) as good a shot as anybody else to win it all (again) this year, and that Michigan State is (according to Sokol) evidently ripe for an upset. The bad news is Sokol's predicted national champion...the Tar Heels of North Carolina.