Chances are, if you followed my picks in your pool, you probably won some money. I placed second out 29 entries in one pool and seventh out of 89 entries in another. I would have done better in the second pool but the UCLA loss to Memphis knocked me out of the running. Yahoo says that my picks were in the 95th percentile, which is nice to see.
In total, an advantage in Sagarin rating of two or more points gave us the winner of 40 of 48 contests (83.3%). Last year’s winning percentage was 85.7% so I feel pretty confident about using this methodology for my bracket. There were 15 games that were too close to call, so I used other criteria to pick those games:
4+ seed advantage (2-1)
This played a role in three 6/11 matchups in the first round. Purdue and Oklahoma won, while USC lost to Kansas State. In retrospect, maybe I should have considered the location of that game (Omaha, Nebraska) more carefully.
Points per shot (4-4)
PPS is calculated by taking the total number of points divided by the total number of field goal and free throw attempts. A monkey could have picked four out of eight winners, but I still think that there’s merit to using this stat. I think it’s important to look at strength of schedule, however. It’s easy to score if you play mostly bad teams.
Location (2-1)
Location played a prominent role in three picks: Stanford over Marquette (in Anaheim), Texas over Stanford (in Houston) and Texas over Memphis (in Houston). It also played a factor in my Davidson pick (over Gonzaga in Raleigh) and I should have used it in the Oregon/Mississippi State matchup in Little Rock.
Gut (1-1)
I went with my gut for two picks. I took Pittsburgh over Michigan State because the Panthers were hot entering the tourney. I ignored my gut in the Tennessee/Louisville matchup, and I’m not sure what convinced me to take the Vols, so I’m going to pretend I followed my gut and won the pick. (Hey, sue me.)
I know that adds up to 16 games, but that’s because I ignored Memphis’ Sagarin rating advantage in their game against Texas and took the Longhorns in Houston. My bad.
Overall, I think the system worked pretty well. Next season, I plan to devise some sort of strength of schedule adjustment on PPS and see if that produces better results.
