Things were so busy on Thursday, and so depressing on Friday, that I totally forgot that I did this.\u00a0 But the current leaderboard has sadly reminded me.<\/p>\n
As you all remember, I had created my Lunatic simulator.\u00a0 But I didn’t like the results of it – it liked a bunch of teams that were dealing with late season injuries, and it struggled with smaller schools (the games I was nervous about in the Mountain West, I was correct to be nervous…..)<\/p>\n
Anyways, I had put so much work into it (an entire day) and so figured at the last minute on Thursday, it would be fun to see how it would have done if I went with it.\u00a0 And I figured, I might as well give it a chance against a real statistical model – the Ken Pomeroy rankings.<\/p>\n
To be fair to Mr. Pomeroy, I didn’t give it some of the flexibility that I gave the simulator.\u00a0 While I am sure he has some way to weight upsets, I didn’t know it when I was scrambling to do this.\u00a0 And so I simply picked the team that was ranked higher in his rankings.<\/p>\n
For the simulator, I gave it some value to try to predict updates.\u00a0 And so, if it believed an underdog based on seed would have at least a 45% chance of winning the game, it took it.\u00a0 That didn’t happen often, but it happened enough so that the simulator wouldn’t simply pick the chalk all the way through.<\/p>\n
Well, after Saturday’s games were done, the Lunatic simulator was tied with Mr. Pomeroy for 9th place at 350 points.\u00a0 For those worried about prizes – don’t worry.\u00a0 I put the statistical models picks in as “For Fun” entries – they can’t win the money.<\/p>\n
That lead was somewhat short-lived.\u00a0 KenPom picked Xavier and the Simulator picked Iowa State, and so the Simulator dropped down to a tie for 46th place.\u00a0 But there are other places the Simulator is looking pretty smart (such as it picking Arkansas to upset Kansas)<\/p>\n
But considering the Lunatic’s sane picks are in 248th with only 290 points, it looks like I should have taken my losses in the Utah State and Boise State games and gone with the statistics…..\u00a0 I am going to keep my confidence that my picks can recover – at the end, it matters how your Final Four teams and champion does.\u00a0 While I have been impressed with Houston, I am not convinced that they can cut down the nets.\u00a0 Then again, my dream picks had Purdue – so I guess I could do worse than having the Cougars…..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Things were so busy on Thursday, and so depressing on Friday, that I totally forgot that I did this.\u00a0 But the current leaderboard has sadly reminded me. As you all remember, I had created my Lunatic simulator.\u00a0 But I didn’t like the results of it – it liked a bunch of teams that were dealing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2513"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2514,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2513\/revisions\/2514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}