Obviously, Pitt losing was a tough blow for my bracket. Anytime you drop a Final Four team in the first weekend, it hurts. But in the grand scheme of things, Pitt’s loss is not a bracket killer, at least not in the two pools (~20 players each) that I’m in.
At this point, I still just need Ohio State to beat Kansas in the Final and I’ll probably finish in the money. It would help if Duke made the Final Four and if Florida didn’t — the best thing for those of us that had Pitt would be for Butler to make a repeat appearance in the Final Four, because then no one but the faithful Butler alumni would be capitalizing on Pitt’s loss.
How are Sagarin and Pomeroy’s rating systems faring so far? Pretty darn good. Teams with a three-point Sagarin advantage are 26-4 (87%) so far (with USC, Louisville, G-Town and Pitt the four losers). Teams with a two- to three-point Sagarin advantage are just 1-2, but teams with a slight (zero- to two-point) Sagarin advantage are an impressive 9-2. Usually anything under two points is a toss-up, but Sagarin’s ratings have performed well in this area over the last two years. Overall, Sagarin went 26-6 in the first round.
Pomeroy’s numbers are just as impressive. I track four different groups — 70%+ (20-4), 65%-70% (4-0), 60%-65% (2-1) and 50%-60% (9-4) — and they’ve all been pretty strong thus far. His favorites went 25-7 in the first round.
If you’re looking for updated Sagarin and Pomeroy data, click here. Keep in mind that for record-keeping purposes, I use the static data from before round one to calculate all of these won/loss records since that’s all that’s available to users to make their bracket picks.
