Wondering whether your bracket will be completely busted after the Final Four games Saturday? Anxious to find out which of the remaining teams in the NCAA Tournament will emerge as the champion Monday night?
Live in the shadows of doubt no longer; I have talked to an expert.
And by expert, I mean psychic.
I have always wondered what oracles had to say about the outcome of upcoming sporting events. So I went to one and asked her who was going to win in the Final Four Saturday.
Nothing spells accurate college basketball predictions like a dark, smoky room and a wrinkly woman in a beaded dress.
Upon convincing her this was not for gambling purposes, she sat me down and began the “reading.” Though admittedly a slightly dubious way to prognosticate the Villanova/North Carolina and Michigan State/UConn matchups, it is a resource left largely untapped by all the sports analysts. Here’s to getting a leg up.
After much ado about each team’s “energy” and “astrology” and references to “Leo rising” for North Carolina, I finally got some answers: UNC beats Villanova and Michigan St. beats UCONN in Final Four action; the Tar Heels get the best of the Spartans in the national championship game Monday night.
Must be that rising Leo.
This is clairvoyance like Dick Vitale couldn’t fathom. We are no longer talking about basing a team’s performance on players, coaches, previous games or any other practical measure. Rather, we are taking the lead from some quack dressed like a hippie gone goth.
But at a time of the year when it seems like everyone has filled out a bracket, we all are playing the role of psychic to some extent. We really have no idea why we picked that 10-seed to make it to the Final Four. We just had a feeling. For most of us, we look at each matchup and give it our best guess, probably based on some combination of knowledge, hope, allegiance and instinct.
There are some people out there, though, that have a method to the madness.
One organization — payscale.com — that analyzes salaries tried to forecast the tournament outcome based on the income of each school’s 30- to 40-year-old graduates.
Nice try. Last year it had Stanford ($113,000) ousting Notre Dame ($99,100) in the championship game. Too bad in the real world, it was Kansas beating Memphis.
If we applied that strategy to this year’s Final Four, we would get UConn ($71,319) topping Michigan State ($63,381) and Villanova ($89,526) downing North Carolina ($82,648). The Wildcats would edge out the Huskies for the title. (Virginia, with an average of $95,930, would beat all of them.)
Other people, however, take more of a supernatural approach and base their brackets on astrology. By “using the scheduled tipoff time for the chart” and having “the favored team ... on the ascendant, and the opponent ... on the opposite, in the seventh house,” astrologists can predict who will win. They did not fare half-bad, either. This year, for example, one astrologist correctly predicted a number of upsets: He had Western Kentucky, Dayton, Michigan, Maryland, USC, Wisconsin and Arizona all upsetting their first round opponents. Then again, he also had North Dakota State beating Kansas and Portland State downing Xavier.
Then there are others who, instead of looking at the heavens to provide guidance, are hunched over stat sheets, algorithms and calculators like some sort of modern-day John Nash. Nate Silver has made a name for himself by predicting the outcome of a variety of events based on a complex statistical analysis of past data.
Silver started his career by creating an algorithm that forecasted the future value and performance of baseball players. He recently changed directions and channeled his skills toward predicting the outcome of presidential primaries and the presidential election.
A few weeks ago, Silver wrote an article about foretelling the outcome of the NCAA Tournament. Though he admits his expertise lies in baseball rather than basketball, Silver used a number of different “power ranking” algorithms to show each team’s chances of winning it all. The three teams with the highest odds of winning the championship based on the different power rankings were UNC, Pittsburgh and Memphis.
Though Silver did not use any sort of statistical analysis of his own, someone else did. Using vectors, matrices and a “batch gradient descent,” Danny Tarlow tried to forecast the tournament based on numbers alone. After a ton of calculations that I won’t bother to explain (read: can’t explain), Tarlow had Memphis beating Louisville and North Carolina beating Pittsburgh in the Final Four. His calculations had the Tar Heels defeating the Tigers in the championship game.
So who is going to win it all? It depends on who you ask. Tarlow, our psychic and Silver would say UNC. The astrologists would have to consider the tip-off time before they told you who was going to win. The workers at payscale.com might have you believing Villanova will take down UConn Monday night.
They all have different ways of trying to make sense of March Madness. And, of course, neither the supernatural oracles nor the statistics-based prognosticators have been completely accurate. Maybe the answer lies in some combination of the two. Maybe it lies in the salaries of graduates for each school. Or maybe the answer rests in the alignment of the stars.
God knows they will be shining brightly on Saturday and Monday.
Read More
No. 24 women’s soccer not to be denied in late win over Clemson
By Sam Chun | 2 hours agoThe Cavaliers topped Clemson 1-0 in front of a packed out Klöckner Stadium.
Men’s soccer, totally discombobulated, capitulates early to No. 5 Pittsburgh
By Michael Liebermann | 3 hours agoPittsburgh set a program record for the quickest cluster of three goals.
No. 4 field hockey shut out for first time of season in defeat at No. 2 North Carolina
By Eleanor Lynch | 16 hours agoThe Cavalier offense had its worst outing of the season as they were once again defeated by the rival Tar Heels.
