Bring on the Madness

Dissecting America's most involved sporting event.

On Sunday, March 16, the NCAA will announce the field of 65 for the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. You and I know it as March Madness. More worktime productivity is lost to this event than any other in the world of sports. Brackets are filled out, office pools formed, and millions of dollars are won and lost in bets. Teams like the George Mason Patriots pull off improbable upsets, delighting some fans and infuriating others. An incredible 32 games are played in the first two days of the tournament. It's insanity. It's chaotic. It's as close to perfection as we can get in sports.

In preparing to fill out my own bracket, I've been analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of teams likely to make it into the tournament. There are a number of statistics one can look at to get a sense of the strength of a team. The most readily available one is the Associated Press poll. Sportswriters across the nation rank the top 25 teams, and the final point totals are posted in the official poll. The rankings are used when publicizing a game (a recent game between #1 Memphis and #2 Tennessee comes to mind), but are in essence subjective. There aren't any solid statistics or data that go into the rankings. For a more precise measurement, some turn to the Ratings Percentage Index, which is calculated based on wins and strength of schedule. The RPI is used by the NCAA selection committee in determining which teams should be given at-large berths in the tournament. This gives us a better look at which teams are more likely to do well during March.

Yet this still fails to take into account a statistic I think is a better indicator of future performance than wins and losses - scoring differential. Simply put, this is a statistic that shows, on average, how much a given team is winning its games by. A team winning games by an average of ten points should be better than a team winning by only five points. However, you can't stake everything on scoring differential. There's a big difference between beating Duke by twenty points and beating 0-29 New Jersey Institute of Technology by that same margin. To account for that, I added both the team's RPI and their strength of schedule into the mix to arrive at a statistic I called (for lack of a better name) the Sam Power Index (SPI).

The SPI holds up pretty well with the projected seeding I got from ESPN's Joe Lunardi. Take a sample matchup between West Virginia and Baylor. Lunardi has the Mountaineers taking the higher seed, even though they've only won one more game than Baylor. A look at the SPI shows why: West Virginia has a scoring differential of 13.1, compared to Baylor's 7.4. This gives them an SPI of 4.279, nearly two points above Baylor. The seedings bear this out, putting West Virginia on top. (The Mountaineers actually have the 12th highest SPI, which would likely put them in Elite Eight territory, were it not for third-ranked North Carolina looming in the second round.)

I'm not going to claim that the SPI is perfect. Far from it, actually. According to the SPI, Ohio State should have won last year's finals. Comfortably. Ohio State had an SPI of 7.801, which is significantly higher than any teams's SPI this year. Florida had a paltry 6.406. A gap of over a point is cause for alarm. Yet Florida won by nine points. That's why I include a smell test. Occasionally, there will be predictions of one team beating another that don't seem quite right. An example is a projected third round matchup of 26-5 Xavier and 25-4 Georgetown. Xavier has the higher SPI at 5.119, nearly a full point above Georgetown. Seems like an easy win for the Musketeers. Yet Xavier has faltered down the stretch, while Georgetown has remained constant and won the Big East, the country's deepest conference. Even though the math has Xavier winning, I'm going to trust my gut and pick Georgetown. (And I'm still picking them to lose to North Carolina.)

Of course, anyone reading this column will be wondering who I've picked to win it all. I'm not going to spoil my advantage by giving that away, but I will give you my Final Four: Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, and UCLA. And lest you worry that I'm trying to dodge accountability by not posting my predictions publicly, rest assured that I'll provide updates throughout the tournament. I will say this, though: if you're looking for an upset pick, look no further than Western Kentucky. They're projected to land a 13 seed, but they have an SPI of 3.410. That's better than one of the 3 seeds. Look for them to do some damage this year.

Photo from Associated Press