 Seed distributions for the NCAA men's basketball tournamentSheldon H. Jacobson, Alexander G. Nikolaev, Douglas M. King and Adrian J. Lee Omega, 2011, vol. 39, issue 6, 719-724 Abstract: Bracketology, the art of successfully picking all the winners in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) annual men's Division I college basketball championship tournament, has become a favorite national activity. In spite of the challenges and uncertainty faced in this endeavor, patterns exist in how the seeds appear in each round, particularly the later rounds. This paper statistically analyzes tournaments from 1985 to 2010, finding that the distribution of seeds that win in the rounds beyond the Sweet Sixteen can be modeled as a truncated geometric random variable. This model allows one to consider any set of seeds in each tournament round and compute the probability that these seeds would win in that round; this methodology can evaluate the likelihood of each seed combination in each tournament round, based on past tournament history. Finally, each tournament from 1985 through 2010 is analyzed using this model to assess its likelihood and measure the probability of its occurrence. Keywords: NCAA; basketball; March; Madness; Bracketology; Tournament; seeds; Geometric; distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jomega:v:39:y:2011:i:6:p:719-724 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Omega is currently edited by B. Lev More articles in Omega from Elsevier |
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