With about 16 minutes, the Cardinals and the Blue Devils were tied at 42. And then Louisville went into ultimate defensive shutdown. The Cardinals kept driving into the lane and getting layups – and no matter where Duke shot the ball from, they missed. For the next 10 minutes, Duke only scored 1 FG. And Louisville cruised to a 22 point victory.
At this point in the game, Rick Flynn is dominating the field – as he has the lead in both pools. He has a 110 point lead in the standard pool over Kyle Kelly, with Adam Davis in 3rd, Pete Schmitke in 4th, and Matt Agin in 5th. While Rick’s lead is pretty significant, the fact that he has Michigan winning (and many people have Louisville winning) means that people still have a chance.
However, Rick might have wrapped up the Upset pool. Right now, he has a 25 point lead over Adam Davis, 48 points over David Gatewood, 56 over Mark Horgan, and 57 over Rohit Kapoor. While it is un-official (since I am just judging by what I see on the top of the standings page), I don’t think anyone can catch Rick in the Upset pool – no matter who wins.
Rich Feyerabend is the king of the Second Chance Pool – as he picked all but the Wichita State / Ohio State game correctly to lead by 40 points over Kyle Kelly. Nick Kindig rounds out the top 3 – just 80 points behind.
As for the Lunatic, his tournament is over with. The Lunatic was hanging onto hope that the Blue Devils would win – since he was the highest person on the standings who picked Duke to win the tourney. But after the Cardinals’ awesome 2nd half, the Lunatic curse strikes again to knock off the Blue Devils as well as any hope of respectability for the Lunatic’s picks. This loss shoved the Lunatic all the way down to a tie for 105th. And with no correct Final Four teams, there will be more time for people to Stomp the Lunatic!!!!
Congratulations to all the leaders – as well as Louisville, Wichita State, Michigan and Syracuse – the teams that will be playing in Atlanta for the National Championship!!!!
One response to “And the last team is Louisville”
Well, every bracket I have is busted no matter how you slice it, so I will pretend like all I really care about is my probability model. Which is holding up.
I made a small improvement in my simulator today–now, rather than assuming I have estimated the correct “true” team quality factor and simulating the million tournaments off of those values, I now resample each team’s quality factor for each simulated tournament. (I don’t do the full multivariate draw–that will be another year’s few hours of work. But, I don’t think getting the correlations a bit better tracked is going to make any difference.)
So, while my probability model is certainly not perfect (it is just a model), it does given me a sense for how the tournament generally turns out statistically. Here are some factoids (looked at from before the tournment starts, not from this point on)
The chance of having no number 1 seed or only one number 1 seed in the final four is 58%. (So this years is pretty routine there.)
The chance of having all four number 1 seeds make the final four is 3%.
Some number 1 seed has a 34% chance of winning the tournament.
Some number 9 or higher seed has a 3% chance of winning.
The sum of the final four seeds has a chance of being 18 or higher of 10%. (note, 18 is the sum of our 2013 final four seeds)
The chance that a number 9 seed or higher is in the final four is 11%.
So, the Wichita State success is a bit on the edge of my model (11%) but not enough to make me feel like I am wildly off.
Well, all I can do is lick my wounds. My Lunatic pool bracket has me at 144 of 365, or 60th percentile. The identical bracket at Yahoo has me at 59th percentile. I am much more use to 90th percentile, but, as I said a week ago, the seeding seemed really smart to me this year, so the differential value of my model is deteriorating. (And I have no good ideas how to regain meaningful competitive advantgae. I think that this industry my be commoditizing. If it stays like this I may have to find some less efficient industry–Australian rules football maybe? Taiwan ping-pong? But I’ll keep trying in March Madness to see if the seeders really have gotten good or if they just got lucky this year.)
Congrats to the leaders.
-Bill