SPI Update, 21 March

Lots of upsets, and big ones, too.

This is the downside of going public with a bracket you think is really good - when it takes a nose dive, everyone finds out. There were four big upsets today, and my metric only got two of them right. And even that's debatable. Let's look at the numbers.

Western Kentucky 101, Drake 99. The SPI had #14 Western Kentucky (112.4489) narrowly beating #16 Drake (112.0300). It wasn't an easy choice. Still, it's hard to argue with a scoring differential of 14.8 over your last ten games, even if they come against Sun Belt competition. I had complete faith in the SPI for this one. (That means I spent the entire overtime glued to my computer, watching the score update every few seconds and screaming when Drake pulled ahead with seconds to play.)

San Diego 70, Connecticut 69. This one floored me. San Diego is one of the worst teams to make the field (104.4046, #59 SPI) and UConn is, while not top-tier, pretty solid (110.1566, #24 SPI). I thought this one was a no-brainer. And somehow, San Diego kept it close the whole time and pulled out a squeaker in overtime. Just goes to show you that no statistics-driven metric is perfect.

Siena 83, Vanderbilt 62. I liked Siena in this matchup and was so confident I didn't expect anything other than a Siena blowout. I got it, but a quick look at the SPI chart surprised me. Vanderbilt was ranked considerably higher than Siena in pretty much every category. Look at the numbers:

SPI Vanderbilt 108.0898 Siena 106.6667
SOS Vanderbilt .5644 Siena .5143
Scoring differential Vanderbilt 7.2 Siena 5.9

Not really sure why I was so confident there, but I picked the upset and got it. Weird.

Villanova 75, Clemson 69. Here's one where I was just dead wrong. Seriously. How could I have seen #25 Clemson (109.8635) losing to #58 Villanova (104.6078)? The mind boggles. I just don't get this one.

Overall, the SPI performed significantly worse today, only going 9-7 for a total of 24-8. Not a good day. For comparison, my wife's bracket is 25-9. Also, she wishes to inform the loyal readers of the Worb that her bracket was not solely determined by name recognition, but by an elaborate process consisting of looking at both the team's seed and their win-loss record. I thought you should know out of duty to accuracy (which means I had to tell you on penalty of no sex until I'm 75).