2010 Bracket Breakdown

So how did we do? Here's a breakdown of ours' and some other notable brackets using some data from The Bracket Project Blog and our scoring system (QPI).

	Teams Picked Correctly	Seeded Exactly	Seeded Within One	Parrish Score	Paymon Score	QPI
The Quest	64	34	54	152	314	47
B1011	63	31	54	148	305	55
Palm2	65	31	55	151	312	48
BP3	64	31	53	148	307	54
ESPN4	64	27	54	145	300	57
Rivals5	63	29	57	149	304	52
SI6	64	27	56	147	302	55
Yahoo7	64	29	58	151	308	51
Parrish8	65	24	55	144	298	54

(1 = Bracketology 101, 2= Jerry Palm, 3 = The Bracket Project, 4 = ESPN's Bracketology, 5 = Rivals, 6 = Sports Illustrated, 7 = Yahoo! Sports, 8 = Gary Parrish)

Overall, we dominated the field against those who do this as a profession or have dedicated much more time. Regardless of the scoring system (Paymon, Parrish, or QPI) we pulled in the top score. Take a further look at this data and decide for yourself how this happened.

	Picked Correctly	Seeded Exactly	Off by 1	Off by 2	Off by 3	Off by >3	Off by 3 or more
The Quest	64	34	20	10	0	1	1
B1011	63	31	23	7	2	2	4
Palm2	65	31	24	7	2	1	3
BP3	64	31	22	8	3	1	4
ESPN4	64	27	27	7	3	1	4
Rivals5	63	29	28	6	0	2	2
SI6	64	27	29	6	1	2	3
Yahoo7	64	29	29	3	3	1	4
Parrish8	65	24	31	8	1	1	2

 

According to this data, you can see how incorrectly seeding teams by 3 or more correlates to the QPI index. The QPI was created to penalize bracketologists for not only missing teams in the field but also penalizing them for how far away they are from the correct seed.

This was our second real attempt at bracketology, and we have excelled beyond expectations. I credit this to two items. The first is in regards to an earlier post I had in regards to checks and balances. The actual selection committee has checks and balances and bringing in a third member to our team helped us make some last second line changes to more closely emulate the committee. The second is in regards to trending. We took to heart what previous committees have done and listened to what the current committee said they would emphasize. This wouldn't have been possible without the advanced spreadsheet skills dispelled upon us in high school computer applications class with web queries, vlookups, and matrix algebra aplenty in our analysis.

Although the committee loves college basketball almost as much as we do, they are not former coaches and players. They are ADs that look at proposals and make decisions. The Quest for 65's uncanny ability to both assess teams via the 'eye test' and quantitatively evaluate their résumés has paid dividends in being master controllers of 2010 Men's NCAA Bracketology!!