Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

This weekend marks the end of the 2023 men's college basketball season with the annual Final Four. Just like the fans, the Michigan State Spartans will be watching the game at home. But just a week or so ago, some Michigan State fans were dreaming big. Michigan State played very well during the first weekend in wins over No. 10 Southern California and No. 2 Marquette to advance to the Spartans' first Sweet 16 since 2019. That alone is a great accomplishment for a team with limited preseason expectations, injuries, and a team that flirted with a .500 Big Ten record for most of the regular season. But the Spartans' Tournament run came to an end with an overtime loss to Kansas State in the Sweet 16. While the vast majority of Spartans fans were happy with the season overall, a subset of Michigan State fans were left wanting more. The path to a potential National Championship Game appearance opened wider as the weekend progressed. In times like this, I often fall back on the co...

For college basketball fans around the country, March is the best month on the calendar. The first two weekends 2023 men's NCAA basketball tournament provided more than the usual amount of drama. There were big upsets, buzzer beaters, big comebacks, and a ballroom filled with Cinderellas.  As March draws to a close, we are left with just four teams standing, and there is not a blue-blood or top seed in sight. To some people watching teams like San Diego State and Florida Atlantic square off for a chance at the National Title game is fun. For others, the lack of top teams or teams with "name recognition" is a concern. The talking heads are already predicting gloom and doom for ticket sales and televison ratings. https://twitter.com/NicoleAuerbach/status/1640525254056628224 But why do people expect the rating will be low? For me, this begs an interesting scientific question. Historical television ratings are fairly easy to find. A simple google search provides Final Four vi...

Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by March Madness. As a teenager, I created hand-drawn brackets, many of which still reside in a laminated green folder on my book shelf. As a young adult, I started recording the results on a simple spreadsheet. Over the years, that spreadsheet became more complex and powerful. Today, I have found that I can use modern analytics and computational tools to gain a better understanding of the tournament itself and perhaps even how to get some hints as to how the tournament might play out.  While there is no foolproof way to dominate your office pool, I have discovered a few tricks along the way that I find helpful. While we wait for the games to begin in earnest on Thursday, I will share some of what I have learned and how it applies to the 2023 bracket. Methodology Overview The foundation of my methodology is an observation that I made several years ago that boils down to this: When it comes to NCAA Tournament upsets, the behavior is exa...

After 14 weeks and 139 total games, the 2022-23 Big Ten regular season of men's basketball is complete. Every Big Ten season contains its own share of drama, but the overall parity of the conference this year made the final weeks more unpredictable than ever.  Just over a week ago, my calculations suggested that the Spartans had only about a 2% chance to earn a double bye in the Big Ten Tournament. When the dust finally settled on Sunday evening, Michigan State (with some help in at least eight of the other final 12 Big Ten contests) completed the season in fourth place and thus beat the odds. Final Look at the Big Ten Standings Table 1 below shows the final version of the enhanced Big Ten standings. In this table, I have also highlighted the final luck/grit metric for each team and each team's relative strength of schedule advantage or disadvantage (both measured in wins). Table 1: Final   enhanced Big Ten standings as of March 6, 2023. The strength of schedule metric is calc...

The final weekend of the Big Ten race is finally here, and it is shaping up to be the wildest finish in recent memory. As of Friday, March 3, the expanding Big Ten standings are shown below in Table 1. Table 1:  Enhanced Big Ten standings as of March 3, 2023. All 14 Big Ten teams have just one game remaining and remarkably exactly half of the conference has exactly eight losses with Rutgers sitting below the pack with nine losses. Due to this unprecedented parity in the middle of the league, there are still a large number of Big Ten Tournament scenarios in play. As I have been doing all season, I use math to break it all down. Big Ten Tournament Odds The updated Big Ten Tournament seeding odds are shown below in Table 2. Table 2: Big Ten Tournament seeding odds as of March 3, 2023. The numbers in parentheses are the changes since the previous update last week. A very small number of things have been clarified. Purdue was able to beat Wisconsin on the road Thursday evening to claim...