NCAA Picks – 3/21/2015
If I had to pick all 8 games today against the spread (Games I really like in bold):
Arkansas +5
Butler +4
Cincinnati +16
Georgia State +6.5
NC State +9.5
Ohio State +9.5
UCLA -5.5
Utah -4
Cheers.
P.S. This is pretty cool.
March Madness bracket advice, adjusted for 2015
It’s that time of year again, and while you can go to just about any media outlet for March Madness advice, I’m fairly confident you won’t get most of the stuff that I’m going to write about here. I think that’s a good thing?
As preliminary thoughts, feel free to check out my two posts from last year:
What are the actual odds of someone picking a perfect bracket?
Okay, here are some thoughts and general strategies.
1- Your first round choices depend on your scoring system. And maybe even your second round picks, too.
Most pools can generally be separated into one of two categories – those with upset points or those without upset points.
Strangely enough, the vast majority of people entering picks in pools with upset points pick the same way as they would in pools without upset points. This is silly. In upset pools, for example…
View original post 529 more words
Some NCAATournament Thoughts
Who is going to win this thing?
Kentucky.
Teams not named Kentucky most likely to win
Wisconsin
Arizona
Duke
Virginia
Gonzaga
Villanova
Best Double Digit Seeds
Ohio State
Texas
BYU
Indiana
Davidson
Upset watch
Purdue (9) over Cincinnati
Texas (11) over Butler
UCLA (11) over SMU
Someone (11) over Xavier
Someone (11) over Providence
Ohio State (10) over VCU
Buffalo (12) over Virginia
Valparaiso (13) over Maryland
Georgia State (14) over Baylor
Bold Predictions
All four 11 seeds win in round one.
Utah to the final 4.
Notre Dame lose in the first round.
Most likely Final 4
Kentucky
Wisconsin
Duke
Virginia
Stretch Final 4
Kansas
Arizona
Oklahoma
Iowa State
Crazy Final 4
Texas
Ohio State
Michigan State
Utah
Best X seed
1 – Kentucky
2 – Arizona
3 – Oklahoma
4 – North Carolina
5 – Utah
6 – SMU
7 – Wichita State
8 – San Diego State
9 – Oklahoma State
10 – Ohio State
11 – Texas
12 – Buffalo
13 – Harvard
14 – Georgia State
15 – New Mexico State
16 – Coastal Carolina
Worst X seed
1 – Villanova
2 – Kansas
3 – Notre Dame
4 – Georgetown
5 – Northern Iowa
6 – Butler
7 – VCU
8 – Cincinnati
9 – St. John’s
10 – Georgia
11 – Boise State
12 – Wofford
13 – Eastern Washington
14 – Albany NY
15 – Texas Southern
16 – Hampton
Some bets
Northeastern +13
Lafayette +23
Harvard +11
Utah -6.5
Arkansas -7.5
Georgetown -7
Louisville -8.5
Oklahoma State +1.5
Oklahoma -13
To win
Ohio State +10000
Texas +10000
Utah +6000
Oklahoma +6500
How did I do predicting the NCAA tournament bracket?
Number of correct teams predicted: 66 out of 68.
Number of correctly seeded teams: 29 out of 68
Number of teams correctly seeded within one seed: 60 out of 68
Teams I had OUT that made it: Cincinnati (9) and Boise State (11)
Teams I had IN that didn’t make it: Stanford and Texas A&M
Biggest discrepancies: Texas (predicted: 8, actual: 11), Xavier (predicted: 9, actual: 6), Michigan State (predicted: 5, actual: 7), Georgetown (predicted: 6, actual: 4), Ohio State (predicted: 8, actual: 10), Dayton (predicted: 9, actual: 11), San Diego State (predicted: 10, actual: 8), LSU (predicted: 11, actual: 9)
Predicted Seed (Actual Seed)
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NCAA basketball week in review
NCAA Tournament Stuff
Here are my updated tournament projections with seedings. I’ve got Kentucky (obviously), Villanova, Virginia, and Duke as my top 4.
Conference Breakdown
I’m pretty sure this won’t really happen, but if I was selecting the teams for the bracket, I’d take 7 teams from the Big 12 (Kansas, Iowa State, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Baylor, Texas, and Oklahoma State). It’s a really good conference.
Also with 7 teams is the Big Ten (Wisconsin, Maryland, Michigan State, Iowa, Purdue, Ohio State, and Indiana).
I’ve got 6 teams each from the Big East (Villanova, Butler, Georgetown, Providence, St. John’s, and Xavier), SEC (Kentucky, Arkansas, LSU, Georgia, Texas A&M, and Ole Miss) and ACC (Virginia, Duke, Notre Dame, Louisville, North Carolina, and NC State). Though I think the committee is going to have a hard time letting in NC State over Miami, if it let’s either of these teams in at all.
I have the Pac 12 with 5 tournament qualifiers: Arizona, Utah, Oregon, UCLA, and Stanford. Though Stanford still has quite a bit of work to do in this tournament to be that fifth team.
From the Atlantic 10, I’m taking 3 teams: red hot Davidson, Dayton, and VCU. Rhode Island is going to be pissed if they get left out, but they don’t have any really good wins. They are 0-4 against top 50 teams and 0-1 against the top 25. VCU, however, is 3-3 against the top 50 and 1-2 agains the top 25 including wins over Tennessee, Oregon, Northern Iowa, and Cincinnati. The Rams haven’t beaten Dayton, Davidson, nor VCU this year. In fact you have to look really hard to find their best win. Maybe Richmond? or Nebraska? It’s really hard to see ANY quality wins on their schedule.
Rounding out the multi-team conferences I have two each from the Mountain West (Boise State and San Diego State), the West Coast (Gonzaga and BYU), and the Missouri Valley (Northern Iowa and Wichita State). Basically everything I read has BYU as a bubble team. I’m couldn’t disagree with this more. If they don’t get a bid, I’m going to lose my mind a little bit. Not only do I have them in, I have them as a 9 seed and ranked 36th. And don’t just take my word for it, Sagarin has them ranked 34th and Pomeroy has them ranked 29th (that’s one spot AHEAD of Arkansas who is a virtual lock.) Unfortunately, if you live in the dark ages (like the committee) and you use the RPI, they are ranked 44th, which does put them on the bubble.
Good Weeks
Davidson has now won 8 in a row and this last week they beat VCU and Duquesne to take sole possession of first place in the Atlantic 10. I’ve got Davidson as an 8 seed right now (I had them as an 11 seed last week), but if they keep winning a 6 or 7 seed could reasonably happen.
NC State won both of it’s games this week over Clemson and the Syracuse Orange Cheaters. They finish with a record of 19-12 and 10-8 in the ACC. As long as nothing disastrous happens in their tournament, I think they are in. Last week I had them as a 12 seed, but I’ve moved them up to a 9 seed. This jump has a lot more to do with teams ahead of them falling (e.g. LSU, Georgia, Oklahoma State, Stanford, Indiana) than them doing something impressive.
Oregon won last Sunday at Stanford in a game that both teams really needed. Add in a win this week against Oregon State and that equals Oregon moving up to a 7 seed from a 9 seed where they were last weekend.
Other teams that moved up at least one seed this week include Iowa State, Oklahoma, Georgetown, Ohio State, Iowa, Providence, Texas, Xavier, San Diego State, and UCLA.
Bad weeks
Stanford, unlike Oregon, did not have a good week. Last Sunday they lost at home to Oregon and since then have lost two more games. Since then, they have also lost to Arizona and Arizona State. Losing to Arizona isn’t that big of a deal, but they absolutely had to have that win over Arizona State. This all leads to a 3 game losing streak. It is not a good time to be riding a 3 game losing streak. They are also 2-5 in their last 7 games. Not a good look if you’re trying to get into the tournament. Last week I had Stanford as an 8 seed, but I’ve dropped them all the way to 11 and are one of the last 4 in. I wouldn’t be surprised if the committee leaves them out.
I dropped Oklahoma State down to an 11 seed from a 9 seed. They beat TCU this week and lost to West Virginia. Realistically, I don’t see the committee taking a team that is 8-10 in conference and 18-12 overall. This team is somewhat of an enigma. On the one hand they beat Kansas once and Baylor twice, but they also lost to TCU and Texas Tech. I don’t know what the committee will do with that.
LSU got a big win over Arkansas yesterday, but any gain from that win is over shadowed by their home loss to Tennessee on Wednesday. The Vols are 7-11 in conference and 15-15 overall. That’s a bad March loss. I dropped LSU down two seeds to a 10.
Purdue lost to Ohio State and Michigan State this week leaving them at 12-6 in conference and 20-11 overall. I had Purdue as high as a 6 seed, but I’ve knocked them down to an 8 after back to back losses.
Other teams that fell at least one seed this week included Wichita State, SMU, VCU, Georga, Ole Miss, and Indiana.
My gentle criticism of the RPI
Lately, I’ve been chirping about how bad the RPI is. I had some free time this morning, so I thought I’d dig into it and write down exactly why I dislike the RPI. Below you’ll find details on how to calculate the RPI, my criticisms of the formula, and, finally, an example of how RPI can go haywire.
RPI formula
There are three components to the RPI:
- Wining Percentage (WP)
- Opponents’ Wining Percentage (OWP)
- Opponents’ Opponents’ Winning Percentage (OOWP)
Winning percentage (WP)
This is calculated by taking the number of a wins a team has and dividing it by the number of games that team has played. However, since 2005, home wins count as 0.6 of a win and away wins count at 1.4 wins (neutral wins count as 1).
Opponents’ Winning percentage (OWP)
For team 
Opponents’ opponents’ Winning percentage (OOWP)
For team
Linear Weight
For full details of the RPI see Ken Pomeroy’s explanation.
My criticisms of the RPI
- Ad hoc weighting of the games in calculation of WP: Away wins are worth 1.4 wins whereas home wins are only counted as 0.6. This makes an away win more than TWICE as important as a home win. This doesn’t sound right to me. Does anyone know where these numbers (i.e. 1.4 and 0.6) came from? I’d love to know.
- Weighting not done in OWP or OOWP: When OWP or OOWP is calculated, all games are worth 1 win again. Where does the weighting go? This seems like another totally arbitrary decision.
- Averaging averages: I didn’t realize this at first because I couldn’t believe the formula would actually do this, but the formula is taking the average of the opponents winning percentages. That’s different than the winning percentage of the opponents. Here is an example, imagine there are three teams A, B, and C. Team A is 1-9 and team B and C are both 1-0. The winning percentages of these teams is 3/12=0.25. But if we take the average of the averages, as RPI does, we get (.1+1+1)/3=0.7. This does not make sense to me unless all teams play exactly the same number of games.
- Excluding the team from OWP but now OOWP: To calculate the OWP for a team, that team is excluded from the calculation. But that same team is added back in when calculating the OOWP. Why?
- Arbitrary linear weighting: Where did the 0.25, 0.5, 0.25 numbers come from? This again seems entirely arbitrary. (UPDATE: Thanks to the wonderful people of the internet, the answer can be found here.)
- OWP gets the most weight: Why is opponents winning percentage more important than your own win percentage. To boost your RPI is simple, just play good teams. It doesn’t even matter if you lose, as long as your opponents just keep winning. (See my example below.)
A silly example of the RPI gone crazy
I spent this morning trying to come up with silly examples of the RPI. If I’ve coded everything correctly (if you find a mistake please let me know), here’s one example of the RPI gone wild:
Let’s say there are 5 teams: A, B, C, D, and E. A beats C twice, B beats D twice, C beats D twice, A beats E twice, and B beats E twice. (In each set of two games, one game was home and one was away for each team).
Records:
- A: 4-0 (Home 2-0, Away 2-0)
- B: 4-0 (Home 2-0, Away 2-0)
- C: 2-2 (Home 1-1, Away 1-1)
- D: 0-4 (Home 0-2, Away 0-2)
- E: 0-4 (Home 0-2, Away 0-2)
Before you look below, try to make a reasonable ranking of these teams in your head. Write this down and come back to it.
The winning percentages for each team are 1 for A and B, 0.5 for C, and 0 for D and E. The OWP for these teams are 1 for E, 0.5 for A, C, and D, and 0 for B. And the OOWPs for these teams are 0.875 for B, 0.750 for A, 0.5 for C, 0.250 for D, and 0.125 for E.
When we apply the 0.25, 0.5, and 0.25 linear weights to WP, OWP, and OOWP, respectively, we get the following RPI results:
- A: 0.6875
- E: 0.53125
- C: 0.5
- B: 0.46875
- D: 0.3125
Team A ranked first makes sense. They were 4-0 and beat C and E. D ranked last also makes sense. They were 0-4 and lost to B and C. But the three teams in the middle make no sense. Team E is ranked 2nd with NO wins. They are above C who is 2-2 and both losses came against team A. Further, and here is the big finish, team E, at 0-4, is rated above undefeated team B in spite of the fact that team B beat E twice! That makes no sense. You could go on constructing these scenarios all day. It’s really not that difficult to make crazy scenarios happen with the RPI formula. What’s happening here is the team E is being inflated by their OWP, which is the largest component of the RPI. More important than even their own winning percentage. The RPI makes no sense.
What is my point?
The RPI makes no sense. Get rid of it. For rankings that make sense, check out Ken Pomeroy or Jeff Sagarin.
Cheers.
Best and Worst Week’s in NCAA basketball
Projected Tournament Seeds. Who had the best week?
Best Week’s
Up two seeds
Purdue – On a 4 game winning streak with a win @ Indiana in the last week
Iowa – On a 4 game win streak with a win over Illinois in the last week
LSU – On a 3 game win streak with a win over Ole Miss yesterday
Georgia – On a 3 game win streak with a win @ Ole Miss on Wednesday
Up one seed
Villanova – They haven’t lost since January 3rd. In the past week they beat Providence by 28 and Xavier by 12, both of whom I have in the NCAA tournament. All this equals a 1 seed in my mind.
Baylor – They’ve won 4 in a row and in the last week they won at Iowa State and over West Virginia. Really nice back-to-back wins over tournament teams.
Oklahoma – They beat TCU, which wasn’t that impressive, but enough to bump them up to a low 3 seed.
Maryland – All they did this week was beat Wisconsin. I’ve got them as a high 4 seed.
Wichita St – They beat Northern Iowa yesterday by 14, splitting the season series with Panthers and clinching the MVC regular season title. Both of these teams are in unless something crazy happens. I’ve got the Shockers up to a 5 seed, while Northern Iowa drops to a 6.
Butler – Beat Marquette and DePaul this week. Not much, but I’ve got them moved up to the bottom 5 seed.
St. Johns – They beat Xavier on Monday, sweeping them on the season, and, more importantly, got a win over Georgetown yesterday. Up to a 7 seed.
Stanford – Beat Oregon State by 27 points on Tuesday. They’ve got a big game against Oregen today.
BYU – Biggest win of the week with a victory over Gonzaga AT Gonzaga. I’ve got BYU as a 9 seed. They’d be higher but they have some not so great losses this year like a loss to San Diego and two losses to Pepperdine.
Dayton – Dayton went to VCU yesterday and won a close game by 4. All the talk this year in the A10 has been about VCU, but right now there is a three way tie for first in the division and VCU is not one of those teams.
Davidson – They won at Rhode Island by one point on Wednesday putting themselves in a three way tie for first in the A10. And they’ve won 7 in a row. This A10 tournament is going to be awesome. #parity
UCLA – It’s not really about what UCLA did (they beat Washington), but they benefit from losses by Rhode Island (to Davidson) and Illinois (to Iowa). They play Washington State tonight.
Worst Week’s
Down three seeds
Texas – Texas ends it regular season schedule with 6 games against the top 6 teams in the Big 12. (Oklahoma, Iowa State, West Virginia, Kansas, Baylor, Kansas State). They’ve lost the first 4. I have them in, but realistically they are probably out. If they win both of their remaining game they will be 8-10 in conference. Hard to imagine the committee letting in a team that is 19-12, 8-10 (IF they win out).
Down two seeds
Providence – Lost to Villanova twice in last 4 games including a 28 point loss on Tuesday.
Ole Miss -Lost two important games this week against Georgia on Wednesday and then to LSU yesterday. Not a great as both of those losses should be fresh in the mind of the committee on selection Sunday.
Indiana – Lost to Northwestern yesterday. Northwestern is now 5-11 in conference play and 14-15 overall. #notGood (Northwester also beat Iowa 10 days ago. Weird.)
Down one seed
Wisconsin – Lost to Maryland yesterday. I still have Wisconsin as a 2 seed.
Utah – Lost to Arizona yesterday. No shame in that. I dropped them to the top 4 seed as they were passed by both Oklahoma and Baylor.
Iowa State – Lost two games this week to Baylor and Kansas State. Right now I have them as the bottom 4 seed. Tomorrow’s game against Oklahoma is very important.
West Virginia – Lost to Baylor yesterday, though they were without their leading scorer for the game.
,Northern Iowa – Lost to Wichita State. Still a lock to make the tourney unless something crazy happens. I’ve got them as a 6 seed.
Georgetown – Lost to St. John’s yesterday.
Oregon – Beat Utah and Cal this week Not their fault they fell a seed. They were passed by Stanford, LSU, and Iowa.
Xavier – Lost to St. John’s and Villanova. I have them as a 10 seed now.
Texas AM – Lost to Arkansas this week.
NC State – A horrible loss to BC by 16 yesterday. I have them in, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the committee felt differently than me. These guys are the definition of a bubble team.
Science, “liberal” and conservative media, and global warming
While I was reading my Twitter feed, I can across this tweet:
I was curious, because why would anyone ever have a statistician on a radio show (trying to put the general public to sleep?)? So I clicked. Beitbart radio was interviewing William Briggs because of the paper he wrote called “Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model”. As far as I can tell, the basic argument of this paper is that projections of the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are too high. In the conclusion, the authors state (emphasis added):
Ok. So the authors are refuting one climate model’s projections. That seems reasonable. As far as I can tell, Briggs is a very good statistician (PhD in mathematical statistics from Cornell #impressive) and has a background in atmospheric science and meteorology. I’m not making any comments on the scientific merits of their paper, but let’s see what happens if we assume that their conclusions are reasonable. If that is the case, then climate change isn’t as bad as projected, but it’s still a problem that needs to be dealt with. Basically, let’s still try to to prevent climate change, but we don’t need to be as alarmed as we currently are. But even if that is the case, the authors still acknowledge that climate change is man made. They say:
Finally, suppose that remaining affordably recoverable reserves of fossil fuels are as much as thrice those that have been recovered and consumed so far. Then, the total warming we shall cause by consuming all remaining recoverable reserves will be little more than 2.2 K, and not the 12 K imagined by IPCC on the RCP 8.5 scenario.
“We shall cause”. They are acknowledging that climate change is driven by humans burning fossil fuels, they are merely critiquing the magnitude of the change predicted by other projections. They are NOT saying global warming is not occurring. I know this because I asked one of the authors:
Let me repeat that: An author of the paper is acknowledging that global warming exists and that that they are simply arguing that the projection models are not correct. That is a reasonable argument. For the authors views on global warming see here.
So how did Breitbart cover this story? Their headline was “Experts smeared by media and Greenpeace for debunking global warming”. By the authors own admission, this is not what they did. They didn’t “debunk global warming”. Not even close. Not even in the ballpark. This is so wrong. By the authors own admission. See the screen shot below from the Breitbart article:
So here is where I lose it a little bit. Breitbart is overtly a conservative media organization and one of their favorite past times is yelling about the liberal main stream media. It seems like they found a paper that sort of fit’s their conservative narrative and then took the conclusions a step further (i.e. global warming was debunked).
Briggs seems to agree with the part about yelling about how terrible the liberal media is (even if he disagrees with the headline that Breitbart wrote). A recent post from February 22, 2015 is all about how stupid mainstream reporters are. That post was called “Goon Squad Fails To Distract Public From Fact That Climate Models Stink: Update 3“. Here is a fun excerpt:
It turns out they’d [reporters] rather remain wallowing in their muck than learn about the subjects on which they write.
And one more for fun:
So I failed. I was a fool to try. I let myself forget that I was dealing with a class of people where the gap between actual and perceived ability is not only wide, but is a gaping chasm. To expect mainstream science reporters to understand science is like asking an environmentalist to be reasonable. I should have remembered most journalists suffer from reporteritis, the degrading ailment whereby because reporters cover important people and events they come believe they are important, too. Sadly, there is no known cure.
Ok. Maybe he’s right (I don’t think he is). Maybe science reporters in the media are idiots (I don’t think that) and we should be outraged that they don’t know what they are doing and are spreading false information to the masses. If that’s the case then he must also be outraged that Breitbart misrepresented his findings so badly. Below is his response to the headline when I told him what the headline said:
It seems like Brigg’s words (“It turns out they’d [reporters] rather remain wallowing in their muck than learn about the subjects on which they write”) could equally be applied to Breitbart. So here is my challenge to Briggs: If you are going to criticize the “liberal” media with such passion when they get it wrong, you should also criticize the conservative media with that same passion. I look forward to your post of how much of an idiot the writers at Breitbart are.
Cheers.
An incredibly unscientific ranking of Boston sports championships since 2000
2004 Red Sox (Nothing will ever top this)
2001 Patriots
2011 Bruins
2008 Celtics
2014 Patriots
2013 Red Sox
2003 Patriots
2004 Patriots
2007 Red Sox
Cheers.
Stats in the Wild 