Bracketology 2013: Introducing Our New Algorithmic Bracketology Pages

• 3 comments - > Site Updates, NCAA Basketball, NCAA Tournament - posted by Matt Woods on February 11, 2013

On Friday  we launched a site update that has significantly improved our bracketology 2013 pages. For more background on our approach to projecting the 2013 NCAA bracket, and why our approach is different and better than that of human bracketologists, you can see our post from November introducing our new NCAA bracket predictions.

With a lot of back-end predictive analytics for projecting the NCAA bracket now built, we’re starting to focus more on presenting our algorithmic 2013 bracketology information in new and useful ways.

Bracketology Projections

We’ll be rolling out a new overview page at some point, but in the meantime, we’ve upgraded the table on our 2013 bracketology detailed projections page and made all the columns fully sortable. Just click a column header to instantly sort all 300+ teams by a specific metric of your choice.

We’ve also added team records and projected season win-loss records for each team, which lets you see how we currently think every college basketball team will finish the regular season. Please note that these projected win/loss records do not include projected conference tournament results, just regular season games.

Finally, instead of just being able to see past predictions from yesterday or a week ago, you can now also compare projections from three weeks ago.

Bracketology Trends

On our new 2013 bracketology trends page you can see the biggest recent gains and losses for several projections categories, such as odds to get into the tournament and odds of getting a 1 seed. It’s pretty much impossible to keep track of 300+ teams week in and week out, and this page quickly tells you who’s been moving up and down the most.

As with the bracketology projections page, you can see the largest changes since one day ago, one week ago and three weeks ago. For example, as of this morning (Monday, Feb 11), Illinois’ win at Minnesota yesterday has catapulted the Illini’s odds to get an NCAA bid from 54% to 81%, putting them at the top of the “Biggest change in NCAA bid odds since yesterday” table.

Bracketology By Conference

We’re probably most excited about this one: a 2013 bracketology by conference page that breaks down our projections by each individual conference. This page contains the same information on each team as our bracketology detail page, but is split into multiple sortable conference tables. This way, you can easily see that as of the morning of Feb 11, our models project that the Big Ten will most likely produce a 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 10 seed in 2013, and that despite being 19-12 right now, Iowa only has a 3% chance of making the NCAA tournament.

But that’s not all! The conference tables on this page are ordered by the total number of bids our models expect the conference to get, and that order will adjust accordingly based on our latest projections. Additionally, a table at the very top of the page summarizes the expected number of bids by conference. At a glance, you can see that as of February 11 our models project the WAC as a likely 2-bid league, with Louisiana Tech winning an at large bid and Denver taking the auto bid as the most likely conference tournament champion.

We’ve got a lot more to do here and more fun stuff coming, but we hope you enjoy the latest bracketology page updates.