The real stories everyone should be talking about are how David Carr beat Keegan O’Toole in the semi-finals of the NCAA wrestling tournament at 165, Carter Starocci had to wrestle former national champions back to back in the quarter- (Mekhi Lewis) and semi-finals (Shane Griffith) and he beat them both, and Drake Ayala of Iowa made the finals keep Iowa’s streak of THIRTY THREE years in a row with a national finalist alive.

But you probably want to read about basketball, huh?

So here’s a fun, simple data viz of wins by seed:

Below is a plot of wins by seed in the first round of the men’s NCAA tournament. The 6 and 8 seeds combined for only two total wins ((6)Clemson and (8)Utah State). At least one of every seed 1 through 14 advanced and seed 9 through 12 went went a combined 9-7. In total the lower seed won 11 of the first 32 games.

As for the Kaggle contest, I’m currently in 233 out of 820 (top 30%). Not great, but also not terrible either. There should be a lot more shuffling of the leaderboards in these later rounds with the changes in scoring, so it’s going to be way more exciting than past contests, I think. At least in terms of chaos.

Here are my probabilities for the women’s games today:

Tennessee: 78.2%
UConn: 100%
Kansas: 55.6%
Indiana: 98.0%
Notre Dame: 99.1%
NC State: 98.4%
Iowa: 100%
Syracuse: 72.0%
Oklahoma: 76.0%
USC: 99.3%
Ole Miss: 72.7%
West Virginia: 63.0%
Creighton: 56.2%
Gonzaga: 96.9%
UCLA: 99.0%
Utah: 76.0%

And here are my Kaggle probabilities for the men’s games today:
(Remember, these aren’t probabilities that these teams will win this particular game, it’s the pre-tournament probability that they would make it to a particular round.)

Arizona: 51.6% 
Dayton: 19.5%

Kansas: 47.4%
Gonzaga: 35.1%

UNC: 73.9%
Michigan St: 13.3%

NC State: 14.0%
Oakland: 1.78%

Iowa St: 71.6%
Washington St: 11.9%

Tennessee: 69.5%
Texas: 17.7%

Illinois: 55.5%
Duquesne: 5.83%

Creighton: 47.5%
Oregon: 16.8%

Finally, and most importantly, my numbers (8 and 2) hit in the Utah State-TCU game in NCAA sqaures. So worst case scenario, I only lose half my square buy-in. Lettttttt’s gooooooooooooo.

Cheers.