Final NCAA Update

So, that game was a dog last night -- congrats to an utterly-dominating North Carolina team that just ran Michigan State out of the building. After five minutes, it was over. One final update on the NCAA picks I outlined at the start of the tournament. The high-risk, high-reward value method I advocated lived up to the high-risk part: it finished in just the fifth percentile nationwide in ESPN's contest.

Meanwhile, the picks based strictly on KenPom's ratings finished in the 60th percentile. Which is obviously good, but won't win you a thing in your pool.

The winning entry, by the way, missed five games total in the tournament, and had 15 of the final 16 teams correct, and was perfect after that point. Which is pretty damn good.

So, the strategy didn't work this year, but we'll do a little work in the McClusky math labs before next years tournament. Math will show us the way! I promise!

NCAA picks update

So, after the weekend, the Value Bracket in the 27th percentile nationwide -- and has lost two of the teams in its final eight: West Virginia and Arizona State. As a comparison, picking with the straight KenPom projections puts you in the 63rd percentile.

Also, a great comment on the original post about this way of picking teams, from my neighbor Ariel, who brings the math hammer down:

To add some hard numbers to this analysis: if you believe the nat’l bracket will put you in the 90th %ile, you have probability = .9^n of winning your bracket, assuming that your competition is drawn randomly from the national distribution of bracketologists, and where ‘n’ is the size of your tourney pool. If your pool has 25 contestants, your chances stand at .9^25 = 7.18% using the national bracket; with 100 contestants, your chances drop to .0026% (26 thousandths…). If using KenPom raises your performance to the 95th %ile, your odds rise sharply in a pool of 25 people to 27.73%! On the other hand, in a pool of 100 you’re still looking at .59%, which is a lot better than before, but which would still require playing in a LOT of pools to realize the edge reliably.

Thanks, Ariel!

Risk v. Reward in NCAAs

I did say that the strategy I outlined for an NCAA pool was high-risk, and potentially high-reward. Unfortunately, risk is the clear winner right now. West Virginia, which was one of the most undervalued teams in the entire tournament, just lost their first-round game to the University of Dayton. Great news for the Flyers and their fans (like my grandfather, a Dayton native).

But bad news for the Value Bracket, which just lost one of its Elite Eight teams. So far, the Value Bracket is in just the 12th percentile nationally in the ESPN pool.

Ouch. But not a super shock to me.

Play your NCAA pool like a broker

Link to Google Docs spreadsheet for this post The financial industry isn't the most popular thing in the world these days, but if you're looking for an edge in your NCAA tournament pool, taking a tip from those dastardly hedge-fund managers might pay off.

Slate ran a great story yesterday taking about the problem, and opportunity, in most basketball pools. Generally, the collective wisdom will start to coalesce as the size of a pool grows. In ESPN's bracket contest, which gets millions of entries, you get a great representation of the widsom of the crowd when it comes the tournament (The crowd thinks that North Carolina is the choice to cut down the nets in Detroit).

The crowd, it turns out is pretty damn good at picking the bracket. In 2008, the national bracket finished in the 80th percentile in the ESPN contest. In 2006, it was in the 90th percentile.

But here's the thing -- if you make the same picks as the crowd, you have a very limited chance of winning your pool. Finishing in the 80th or 90th percentile is great, but doesn't win you the pool. If you stick with the crowd, you have little to no chance to score points that other players won't (Imagine a pool filled with identical brackets, to take the point to its illogical conclusion). What you need to do is make smart choices that are contrary to the broader wisdom of the market -- hence, the financial metaphor.

So, how do you do that? I've used the team rankings from the indefatigable Ken Pomeroy, the dean of college basketball stats geeks. Pomeroy's ratings use the concept of offensive and defensive efficiency -- how good they are at scoring each time they have the ball, and how good they are at stopping the other team from scoring on each possession -- to come up with a theoretical winning percentage (Read much more about Ken's ratings at his blog).

The idea is that you have a more objective view of a teams strengths and weaknesses, isolated from all the factors like the quality of their competition, where the games are played, their luck, etc. No statistical system is perfect, but Ken's is pretty darn good, and seems like the best place to start.

Now we can line up the probablity that the KenPom system gives a team to reach a certain round of the tournament with the probablity the crowd has assigned to it. Check the difference between them, and you start to see which teams are over-valued, and which are under-valued.

As I mentioned, the ESPN favorite is North Carolina, which is currently picked to win the national title on 27.9% of all entries. But Pomeroy only assigns the Tar Heels a 9.62% chance of winning the whole thing. That's an asset that's highly inflated.

On the other hand, take Gonzaga. Pomeroy thinks the Zags have a 7.26% chance of winning the tournament, while only 0.6% of ESPN players have picked them. That's an undervalued asset.

Of course, this is a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Stick with the crowd and you probably won't win, although you likely won't finish last. But if that 7% chance of Gonzaga winning the tournament pans out and you're the only one who picked them, you're almost certain to win your pool.

With the risk so low in a pool, there's no reason to play it down the middle -- as Chris Wilson writes in Slate, there's no difference in the payout in most pools between finishing fourth, and four-hundredth.

How do you do it? I've compiled a Google Docs spreadsheet comparing the KenPom numbers with the current ESPN numbers for every team and every round in the tournament. For each round, you'll see the percentage from both sources, and then the delta between them. Teams highlighted in green are undervalued in the ESPN pool compared to the KenPom ratings, and are worth a look (Huge thanks to ESPN and Ken for making all this data available).

I'll be entering a ESPN collective wisdom bracket in its pool, as well as a bracket that's built from this analysis -- we'll see which does better. You can subscribe to my Twitter feed, where I'll post updates throughout the tournament on how they're doing, and I'll post updates here as well.

Like I said, it's high-risk, high-reward. But it's worth a shot.

As the Ball Bounces

Before the start of this year's NBA season, the league introduced a new game ball, made of a microfiber material which was supposed to be more consistent than the old leather balls. The new ball, it was claimed, would absorb moisture better, giving players a better grip.

Just one problem. The players hate it.

Since the beginning of training camp, players have been upset with the switch to a ball that was supposed to have more consistency in the way it handles and bounces. Instead it has less. According to many players surveyed over the past two months, the new ball has stuck to the players’ hands, become frequently lodged between the rim and the backboard, and has also not been able to absorb moisture as well as the leather ball.

Steve Nash, the Phoenix point guard and two-time league most valuable player, wore bandages on his fingers last week because of cuts caused by the new ball. The Nets’ Jason Kidd, and the Dallas Mavericks’ Jason Terry and Dirk Nowitzki have all spoken out against the material, complaining of cuts on their hands.

The league didn't bother to talk to the players beforehand -- instead, they reached a deal with Spalding to create the ball, and then had a big marketing push this summer about it (in interests of disclosure, I featured the ball in Wired).

It's kind of unfathomable that a league would overhaul the one essential tool of its sport without talking to the players who use it on a daily basis. NBA commissioner David Stern, not one for backing down, has admitted the league made a mistake; meanwhile, the player's union has filed a grievance, looking to return to the old ball.

My guess? The leather ball will be back within weeks, and this whole episode will be another case study in the law of unforeseen consequences.

Olympic Basketball Might Be Interesting

First, the U.S. men lose to Italy, now they need a last-second shot to beat Germany. This is really good news for the Olympics. Americans might like watching Dream Teams stomp the world, but as a sport, competition is a very good thing.

No Sleep Til...

Following up from yesterday, the New Jersey Nets reached a tentative deal to sell the team to the group that is hoping to move it to Brooklyn.

Bruce C. Ratner, the New York real estate developer who wants to move the New Jersey Nets to an arena in downtown Brooklyn, reached a tentative agreement to acquire the team for $300 million, defeating a similar offer by Charles Kushner and Senator Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey, the Nets' ownership group confirmed tonight.

"We're in the final stages of negotiating an agreement with Bruce Ratner,'' said Edwin Stier, president of Community Youth Organization, the Nets' ownership group. "The contract terms have been finalized and we're putting the paperwork together.''