Marching Toward Madness

So the spreadsheet has been updated, the numbers crunched and I have flown to Vegas; I am ready to post the Bracket selections for the 2018 March Madness.  If you are in a work pool and/or are not sure what you are doing, start here...  Here is my methodology:   For 1st Round,   Determine % of chance for each team to win that round based on a poll of polls for many trusted models and gut insight from 3 top handicappers (Rick Donegan, Robb Silverstein and myself).    From there I have to decide how many upsets I want to play; the matrix has an 8.3% upset rate in round 1 which means rounded up you have 3 upsets + 2 flipped games (FSU is Fav as a 9 seed, Butler is fav as 10 seed).    So most common upsets in the model are Arkansas (10), Texas (10), Loyola-Chicago (11) and then I"m adding in a gut pick of New Mexico St (12) as I only cost myself 1 round as I have Auburn winning the Round 2 game and the mo play for the 11 seed t...

The Slow Teams Don't Cover Once again we deal with things that are logical but are they always true?.  I have heard many a person talk about how teams that play fast cover as they have more possessions to extend their lead where as favorites that play slow can't cover since they don't have time.  Now we all know this is illogical since Vegas knows their pace and sets the lines with that in mind.    But is there correlation for other reasons? As we did with Totals, lets look at the relationship between favs and dogs that play fast v slow compared to their opponents and their ability to cover & lets look at what possessions really mean to the cover/no cover bet and finally look at how the game types look.   This approach is very similar to what I did in the blog post "The Slow Teams go Under".    To understand some of what I'm saying here, you should read that post.   As always, this is 2 years of data set on p...

The Slow Teams Go Under Many a novice will believe the above statement and assume it is too logical, ie "super simple".  But clearly Vegas knows slow teams go slow and sets lower totals.  So it can't be that simple.    I often see posts in the MMILV group that I am part of on Facebook that also seem to lack understanding of Totals and results compared to trends.  This should provide some real data to drive a real conversation.   Again 2 years since this is all data that is SUPER impacted by possessions and we know since "The Change" the models would reset.    Lets start with the basic, Do slow teams go under?    We have to review off a par , since the past 2 years have not been a 50/50 result in my dataset (which could be a point or hook off to yours since we all bet at different books and at different times into slightly different lines).  My over par will be 59.22% which is the 61-42-1 recor...

The Change In 2016, College Basketball changed dramatically, and that change impacted significantly the quality of play on the court and the ability for gamblers to predict that activity.   5 Seconds.    The move of the shot clock from 35 to 30 seconds is significant.   And gamblers often talk about March Madness trends from earlier this decade without understanding that much of that is invalid data, due to 5 seconds.   The shot clock drives a concept called Average Possession Length.  APL drives number of possessions/game.   One of the best ways to understand and predict future results of points scored by each team is to predict possession counts and then apply possession based stats against those predicted possessions in any given game.    Ken Pom has great data here I'll use to show the impacts of 5 seconds.   If we focus on the Tempo (Possessions/Game Total) you can see it increas...

The Seeds There is nothing more exciting than Selection Sunday.   For me that starts the best week of the year.   (And an aside, my second favorite week of the year is the week before when I'm watching the conference tournaments).    Selection Sunday is the result of an important process that is debated but in reality is very regimented and for gamblers important to understand.   This is the NCAA D1 Men's Basketball Tournament Committee Principles and Procedures.   So many times, I hear/read posts from people who don't understand the realities of how it works.   I'm not going to explain it all here; use this reference:    Long Form -- NCAA  There are 3 steps, they are unique and although at times overlapping done mutually exclusive to each other.    What I think most people will find interesting is that although there is much discussion, the process of selecting and seeding teams...