March Madness wrap-up

Well, I didn’t place in the top two of the March Madness pool I entered this year, but both my brackets did manage to beat all my other family members’ brackets. As I wrote in my previous entry, I also filled out a third bracket, based entirely on a sophisticated ratings scheme. I entered this bracket in the ESPN and Washington Post tourney contests, but not the pool, as it was too boring to fill out. My loss!

Out of 5898 entries in the Washington Post pool, this third bracket placed 52nd; out of what I think were about 3 million ESPN brackets, it finished 33229th. If I had entered it in my brother’s pool, it would have scored 465 points and won.

Let’s have a look at round-by-round performance to answer some bracket questions.

• How did the sports pundits do? Not very well.¹ My brackets beat them.
• How did the individual pundits do compared to their consensus? Only CNN/SI’s Grant Wahl did as well as the consensus of pundits; the rest had lower scores. Sort of a reversal of the conventional wisdom on groupthink. 
• How well do you have to do to win the ESPN or Washington Post contests? You need to nail the elite eight and on out. You need a good showing in the first two rounds, but you don’t have to be perfect. A handful of people in my brother’s pool got 26 first-round winners correct, the same number as the winners of the Post and ESPN contests. The Post winner only had 8 of the Sweet 16 correct, and if it had been an entry in my brother’s pool, it would have been mired somewhere in the middle. The ESPN winner picked 13 of the sweet 16–very good, of course, but at this point it still wouldn’t have been the leader in my brother’s pool.

It would be interesting to see how well the PYTHAG ratings would have predicted the tournament winners in previous years, although I doubt I’ll get around to it this year before my interest in bracket-prediction fades. But I think next year I’ll have to enter a bracket based on it, (and hope that nobody else does the same).

1. At least for cheap-o non-ESPN Insider folks like me, the ESPN pundits’ complete brackets weren’t made available. They did better picking the final four than the CBS or CNN/SI pundits so perhaps they would have done better. [↩]