Quality Curve Analysis: Final Edition

It is that time of the year. The brackets have been released, and it's time to see what this year has in store for us. If you are not familiar with Quality Curve Analysis, here are some articles you should read first (Jan Edition, Feb Edition, Mar Edition). Let's start with a consolidation of all four QCs from each analysis this season.

Bracket-Picker Checklist (Updated 3/15 5:00pm EST)

I know what you're thinking.....this wasn't supposed to come out until after the brackets were revealed. I can't get my original plan to work, so it will have to wait until next year. I didn't finish my back-up because I watched college basketball all day yesterday. Lastly, this was the absolute worst day of the year to spring forward on clocks and lose an hour (of precious data bracket analysis or sleep, your choice). Anyways, this is a quick article and probably slightly informative, and I can always come back and add more stuff to it.

Anyways, this article should probably be called a cheat sheet because it's eventually going to look like one, even though the presentation may not appear that way.

Pulse Check: Champ Week

If any of my readers are familiar with Bracket Science, you will recognize this post, but it may not be what you are expecting. During Champ Week, Pete would post an entry called the Pulse Check, which would gauge potential tournament teams based on specific criteria that he found to be useful in identifying Final Four and Champion contenders. I, as usual, am going to take a different approach. Since a lot of the data in the Pulse Check will eventually be compiled into the Spreadsheet, I am going to present below the 2016 data that will not change, and when all games have finished, the rest of the data usually in the Pulse Check will be compiled into the Spreadsheet. This will save myself a lot of repetitive work. Instead, I am going to look at the Pulse Check from years past to see if there are any patterns or tell-tale signs that will aid us in picking the Perfect Bracket. I guess you could say that I am checking the reliability of the Pulse Check.

As I stated above, here is the data that will not change from here until the start of the tournament. If you compile your own Spreadsheet, you are more than welcome to use it. Also, feel free to double check my work. I complete stuff in binges, so all it takes is one mis-click of the mouse and one team has an Elite 8 appearance that belongs to another team. (Please use the comments below to report typos.)

The Time Line, Part 3: A Macro-Analysis of the Tournament

This is the 3rd part in my series chronicling the Modern-Era (1985-present) NCAA Tournament via a macro-perspective of the game, a perspective often ignored -- accidentally and intentionally -- in most tournament analysis. It is my belief that these macro-factors have played a role in the outcomes of modern-era tournaments, especially the surprises. If you haven't read Part 1 of this series, it details many of the macro-factors in a year-by-year style that will be discussed in this article. My goal for this article is to explain the patterns of trend in the NCAA tournament from 1985 to 1992. (NOTE: 1993 and 1994 could also be included in this analysis since they share many similarities with these years. However, they are probably best viewed as transitory years between this era and the Straight-Outta-High-School (SOHS) Era, which is why I grouped them with 1995 and 1996 in Part 2.)

To start things off, let's look at the Elite 8 Aggregation Model for the years in question. As stated in Part 2 of The Time Line series, the 1985-1992 era of the tournament was mostly calm, as most Elite 8s featured an Aggregate Value between 20 and 25. There were two outlier years in 1986 and 1990 with Aggregate Values (AVs) of 37 and 40, respectively.