What Makes Guessing March Madness Games So Hard?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) --Everyone who fills out a March Madness bracket has their own strategy. Whether it's researching the school's schedule, choosing the lower seed, comparing mascots or just flipping a coin, there's a good chance – an almost perfect chance – the bracket won't be perfect. Never in the history of official brackets has anyone ever reported picking the winners of every single game.
So, why is guessing so hard? Good Question.
"A side of what we're trying to predict is whether 18- to 20-year-olds are going to perform under a lot of pressure," says Tim Chartier, a professor mathematics and computer science at Davidson College. "We're trying to predict the human spirits in a very pressure-y situation."
As a way to teach rankings, Chartier and his colleague created a model to help predict the winners of March Madness. It's appropriately named March Mathness. Included in the model are who the teams have played and whether they played at home or not.
"There's a lot to be said for strength of schedule and there's also a lot to be said for how well you play on the road," said Chartier.
Chartier warns people not to try for the perfect bracket, but rather try for a better one. If a person were to randomly guess at each game, the odds of picking every game correctly are 1 in 9.2 quintillion -- or 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Someone is more likely to win the Powerball – twice.
With a little basketball knowledge, the odds improve to 1 in 120.2 billion. But still.
"There's two parts to sports, there's skill and there's randomness," says Chartier. "The reason we don't predict perfect brackets is because we're trying to guess on randomness."
On average, people guess about 70% of March Madness games correctly. One of the goals of March Mathness is to help people gain an extra few percentage points to win in their pools.
Chartier said people who know more about college basketball aren't more likely to win.
"That's because sports fans will actually change their models," he said. "Particularly when you teach in North Carolina."