Well – while I am sure all of us are ready for Thursday to be here and have the Sweet 16 begin, it is Monday. I thought about blogging about some of the women’s tournament games (there are a couple of really good ones – as UCLA is only up 2 against Creighton, and Iowa is only up 5 against West Virginia). But then I realized, I have tons of material to catch up on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now that the games of the first weekend are over with, and I am not trying to handicap 52 games, I should go back and check up on how my bracketology did. This is always a nervous moment for me – as I hate the idea of not doing a good job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This year, I have two things to check – my bracketology, and my imaginary committee’s bracketology. I got 66 of 68 teams right – while my committee only got 65 of 68 teams. So, it appears that I am better on my own than with a whole bunch of models. Before we compare against the media, lets quickly talk about who I selected wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Basically, I missed on Mississippi State and Virginia. Lets face it – I wanted UVa to get in, but I didn’t expect them to get in with their metrics. And as for Mississippi State, I figured with all the bid stealers, a team that didn’t go better than 50% in their conference would get eliminated. But apparently, the committee went with the metrics on MSU and ignored the metrics for Virginia – who would have guess that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My committee got MSU right (because it was a lot more tied to the metrics), but missed on Virginia, Texas A&M and Northwestern. So – not the best. If I ever do this exercise again, I will need to really improve the metrics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My comparison method uses the scoring method from the Bracket Matrix – this is for two reasons – it is as sensible as any other metric, and it tracks so many people’s brackets that the media picks are already scored. You get 3 points for selecting the team correctly, 2 points for getting the seed correct, and 1 point for getting a team within 1 seed line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For my picks, I selected 66 teams correctly (198 points), got 40 teams seeded exactly correct (80 points), and 60 teams seeded within 1 seed (60 points). 338 points is not bad for me – it is in the middle of the bracket matrix – definitely not the best, but certainly not the worst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The committee did not do as well. It only got 65 correct (195 points), 35 teams seeded exactly correct (70 points), and 57 within 1 seed (57 points) for only 322 points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So – I crushed my imaginary committee. A little sad for me because while it shows that I can do better than some statistics, I had high hopes that the statistics would make my seeding better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyways – the real question isn’t how I did against the entire bracket matrix – it is how I did against the media. And it turns out – not that bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, congratulations to Mike Decourcy – as while I don’t know of all the media members that create a bracket prediction, he did the best of the media members I was tracking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the Lunatic is extremely pleased – while I got one less correct than ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, I did such a better job at seeding that I beat him by 2 points. And I crushed Jerry Palm from CBS (which is a shame – he had this great site that covered the RPI before moving to CBS). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regardless, any time the Lunatic can beat 4 of the 6 media members, that qualifies as a good job for the year. Still a little disappointed that his committee idea crashed and burned – but glad that my last second change to put my committee vote as its own did so well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I will at some point have to clean up the bracketology page – it is still stuck on what it said Saturday morning… There is only so much time in the day (and the Lunatic’s old age simply requires more sleep than he used to – he is still sleep deprived, just he needs more sleep to function). That might be an after the tournament project (or a project for the week leading up to the Final Four – where we have to wait 5 full days for basketball to resume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well – while I am sure all of us are ready for Thursday to be here and have the Sweet 16 begin, it is Monday. I thought about blogging about some of the women’s tournament games (there are a couple of really good ones – as UCLA is only up 2 against Creighton, and Iowa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905","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=2905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2906,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions\/2906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}