[pl-seminar] March Madness

[JOHN CYPHERT <jcyphert@xxxxxxxx>]

Would people be interested in doing a friendly office March Madness bracket contest?

For those who are unaware, to determine the national college basketball champion a big single elimination tournament with 68 teams from across the country is held in March/April. Sunday, the initial bracket was released. It's very popular in offices for people to fill out the rest of the bracket by guessing who will win each game in the tournament. The idea is that everyone who wants to participate will fill out and hand in a bracket before the first game begins. Then there is a way to score each person's bracket depending on which teams actually win. Maybe, whoever wins gets a candy bar.

It only takes a couple of minutes to fill one out, and you don't need to know anything about basketball to participate. The total number of possible brackets is 2^63, so no one ever gets even close to guessing the actual outcome. Due to the large number of possible combinations it is often said that basketball knowledge does not really help in a bracket contest. It is essentially just a fun guessing game based on very little information. 

There is one good piece of information to decide picks and that is the tournament seeds. The tournament selection committee is the group that decides which teams get to participate in the tournament. Also, when the tournament selection committee structures the bracket they rank each team based on their success in the regular season. More specifically, the bracket is divided into four regions, and each region has 16 teams. Every team in a region gets a tournament seed 1-16 assigned by the committee. Thus, according to the committee the number 1 seeded team is better than the number 2 seeded team, which is better than a 3 seeded team and so on. The seedings of teams determine which games will be played. That is, the 1 seed will play the 16 seed, the 2 seed will play the 15 seed, etc. Thus, at the beginning of the tournament the good teams will play the not as good teams, so a lot of picks are pretty safe just based on tournament rankings. However, in the first round who is going to win in the game of the 8 seed and the 9 seed? It's less clear. Also, even though it's probably likely that the higher ranked team will beat the lower ranked team, upsets happen. This is what makes the contest interesting. Who can get lucky, and it is luck, and pick the upsets.

I will give some quick tournament history stats to help make selections

  - Once has 16 seed team has beaten a 1 seed team (this happened last year).

  - Eight times a 15 seed team has beaten a 2 seed team.

  - Once has a 15 seed team won two games.

  - The lowest seeded team to win the whole tournament was 8 (Villanova in 1985)

You can find more stats on wikipedia.

If people are interested you can find the initial bracket here:

https://sports.cbsimg.net/images/collegebasketball/ncaa-tournament/brackets/printable/cbs-sports-2019.pdf

If you want to participate, fill out a bracket and get it to me by person or email before 11 am on Thursday March 21. That is when the first round starts.

If you have any questions, just let me know.

John