I spend perhaps 2 hours during regular season watching college basketballs. OSU alumni and all I know is they lost 2 games, one to the Badgers, and for some reason there are 5 VA teams in the dance. 10 minutes and my picks are done. Went a bit light on upsets this year. Time saved is re-allocated to golf with net benefit of -4 at the SBFE scramble + closest to pin + longest drive = promotion to alpha member of SBFE board. HOOYAH.

When I first heard about First Four games, I also thought that they are eliminating the chance for the small school upsets of 15 seeds by making the worst 8 conference winners play each other in 16/17 games. I would think this is just wrong, but hey….they could claim a tournament win. But by making the extra At Large bids, who in a 64 team field wouldn’t have been in the tournament, play each other in a play in game makes sense. Those 4 teams would be hosting NIT games. Which of these teams if any should be here. They should play each other and find out.

After years of saying ‘Some year’ I finally got my tournament simulator running. I assume my B-T model gives me the correct winning probabilities. I then run through all 63 games and track. Then repeat for like 10,000 or 100,000 tournaments. Some factoids: Given Lunatic scoring expected value of B-T is 990. Standard deviation is 200. The 5%-95% range is 660-1320. I have Kansas as better than Ohio, but Ohio wins with higher probability because they are in a weaker bracket. There is a 5% probability that no Number 1 seed makes the final four. Cool what the machine can do. Anyone have any suggestions for calculations they would like run? No promises, but this is nerd week for me. -Bill

If I win it all it’s due to my 3 year old picking my bracket. THE FORCE IS STRONG IN THIS ONE, IT IS !!!! -Joe

I need help. Having 16 seeds play-in to get to the round of 64 seems a bit silly, but ok, all’s fair in raw commercialism. But what’s this with having 11-seeds (USC/VCU) or 12-seeds (UAB/Clemson) having to playing? Why are better teams having to run through an entire additional round than worser teams? Will someone knowledgable (or simply opinionated will also do) please explain? Thank you.

I think that we might get 5 or 6 Horgans to participate in this year’s competition. I just wanted to throw down the gauntlet early this year to see if any other family units are going to step up to the plate in this large of a manner….the good news for everyone is that only ONE of the Horgans is a statistician (maybe that is ‘bad’ news for everyone considering that we all know how well the statistical models tend to work!).

I think the committee was getting as sick as I was of Joe Lunardi stupid face on the TV 24/7 spouting about the field. He went from being a geek who was good at figuring out who would be in the tournament to being an arrogant clown. Once coaches started saying that ‘Lunardi should have us in after that win’ (see VT beating Duke), I think the committee decided to take him down a peg. Worth mentioning – based on Richmond’s seed, can it be assumed that they were out of the field if they lost to Dayton? That would have been worse than Colorado.

Ha…I’ll keep dreaming

Tom, Thank you, from your multitude of adoring fans, for running this event. You are the Michael Jordan of the March Madness season. And the data you provide every year. Oh–just to die for. Yes, the best weekend of the year, getting to the game history and rebuilding my model. I have tomorrow blocked off to try to find last year’s modeling code. Every year I promise myself I will document and macro-ize so that all I have to do is push a button to generate new predictions. And every year I tweak and play and finish with stray bits of code that collectively generate a reaosnably small number of error messages. And then Jane calls me for dinner. I never document. And never automate. The shame of not practicing personally what I preach professionally. Again, thank you for putting on this temporally and geographically dispersed party. -Bill

Hope that everyone enjoys the new feature on the site! Have fun!!!!!!!