Every year, when March Madness rolls around, I enter two brackets on ESPN's prediction contest, even though I really don't follow college basketball much until the tournament comes around. Like everyone else, I predict my share of upsets, and I honestly try not to just pick willy-nilly. My picks this year were relatively conservative - I took Villanova to win it all, and my Final Four had two number ones and two number twos in it.
My other bracket is what I call "chalk", which just means that I plug in the higher seeded team to win every single game. In the Final Four (which obviously has all four #1 seeds in it) I go from the national seeds, so I still have Villanova winning the tournament.
How the two brackets are doing is instructive if you want to know how the typical fan thinks.
My regular bracket is in the 49th percentile, which means it's above 49 percent of the brackets, which means it's right about the middle of all the entries in the competition. Okay, so I never claimed to be good at basketball picking - just the sports I've studied, namely the variations of football.
My "chalk" bracket, on the other hand?
98th percentile. Top two percent of the game.
So, just picking the teams that the tournament committee thought were better was a superior strategy than picking your own preferences 49 out of 50 times. That seems reasonable. The NCAA Men's Basketball Committee, a group of athletic directors and such charged with the task of selecting and ordering the best teams in the country might know more about doing that than YOU do, or I do, or almost anyone else. In fact, they probably knew more than everybody, except there were a couple of random upsets they couldn't predict because of a hot shooter or injury.
Who'd've ever imagined? Experts who are actually expert?
No comments:
Post a Comment