Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

Basketball season may be over for the Michigan State Spartans, but the NCAA Tournament will be continuing with the Sweet 16 this coming Saturday. After the bracket was released, I presented my detailed analysis of the bracket and made some math-based predictions about how the first weekend and entire tournament might play out. While it would be more fun to write about a potential MSU-Alabama match-up in the Sweet 16 (which might have actually come to fruition had the Spartans simply boxed out properly on a rebound in the final seconds of the First Four contest against UCLA) it is still fun to reflect on the results of the first weekend and to take another math-based looked at the remaining tournament field. If nothing else, in the great words of Coach Mark Dantonio, it is time to complete this circle. Let's start with a review of the wild action of the first two rounds. Results of Rounds One and Two In my analysis of the bracket, I presented data that showed that the average number...

As tip off to the 2021 NCAA Basketball Tournament approaches, serious and casual fans of the sport have likely already made at least one attempt to fill out a bracket for their office pools. Before you make that final submission, I have a bit of advice for you. In the first post of this two-part series, reviewed the historical patterns in NCAA Tournament upsets and explained the mathematical underpinnings of why those patterns exist. With this information, we know why the chaos exists and what a "typical" NCAA tournament bracket should look like. But, we still do not know how to apply that know-how in order to truly dominate our office pools. Well, you are in luck, dear reader, as I am about to give you the keys to the castle. As I alluded to in part one, NCAA tournament results can be predicted to some extent based on point spreads, and point spreads can be estimated using efficiency data, such as the values published by Kenpom. If we combine this knowledge with the baseline...

The calendar says March, and for sports fans, that means that the Madness has arrived. I have never been that interested in gambling (despite my fascination with the predictive power of the Vegas spread) but every year at this time, I make sure to enter as many on-line March Madness and office pools as I can. Over the years, I never had that much luck. I did well a few times, but most years my picks flamed out early. But recently, as my interest in sports analytics increased, I developed a certain strategy to make my picks. In 2019, this new methodology worked very well.  It correctly predicted that Virginia would win the National Title. It predicted that No. 4 seed Auburn was a dark horse Final Four team, and it suggested that the winner of regional final games between No. 1 seed Duke and No. 2 seed Michigan State and No. 1 Gonzaga and No. 3 seed Texas Tech would likely join Virginia and Auburn in Minneapolis. What I have learned from years of studying the tournament is that while...

March Madness is upon us at last Last year, March Madness was cruelly snatched away from us just days before Selection Sunday. College basketball fans have waited 24 months to taste the glory of this most wonderful month on the sports calendar. The waiting is finally over. The bracket has been released. For Michigan State Spartan fans, the wait was unusually long and tense. Three entire regions were announced and the Spartans' name had yet to be called. More concerning was that several obviously less deserving teams (*cough* Syracuse and Utah State *cough*) were already on the board, and it was clear that MSU had either slipped into the First Four... or off from the board entirely. But, around 6:35 p.m. EST as the final section of the West region was revealed, MSU's name was finally called. The Spartans have officially extended the now second longest active NCAA Tournament streak to 23 years. Based on where the Green and White were sitting just three weeks ago, just making the ...

Selection Sunday is finally here. From a very young age, I have been obsessed with March Madness. The games themselves are full of drama, excitement, Cinderallas, buzzer beaters, celebrations, and heartbreaks. But, it is also the structure of the tournament that has always intrigued me. The bracket itself is a thing of beauty. It has an air of a mathematical work of art in the way that it reduces from 64 (or so) to 32 to 16 to eight and then finally to four, two, and then one. It is parade of powers of two, marching to a glorious conclusion. For this reason, I has also long been obsessed with the concept of bracketology. First, it was in the hand-made paper brackets that I made as a child, and patiently filled out as each game game to its conclusion. Then it was the study of how the bracket is assembled, from the s-curve, to avoiding conferences rivals, to geographic optimization. Finally, it was the use of analytics to see if I could use math to dominate my office pool. Last year, thi...

Over the past two weeks, the Michigan State Spartans navigated one of the most intense gauntlets of conference play that I can ever remember. Over the span of 16 days, the Spartans played seven games, three of which were on the road and four of which were against top five ranked opponents. The Green and White went 5-2 over that span, and in the process seem to have secured an NCAA Tournament bid. I was eager to see what Michigan State was going to look like after a few days of rest, and after surviving the previous two weeks. For ten minutes, MSU looked great, but unfortunately, a college basketball game is 40 minutes long, and the Spartans stay in the 2021 Big Ten Tournament lasted just a day. This has very much been a Jekyll and Hyde type of season for the Spartans. Like every other fan, I was hoping that this phase was behind us. I was hoping that Dr. Jekyll was here to stay, but on Thursday, we mostly saw Mr. Hyde. That said, the loss to Maryland may not be all that bad. Had MSU wo...