Warming Up the Crystal Ball

Bracket scientists are all too familiar with the phrase "Bracket Crunch Time." It describes the 88 hours following the full reveal of the tournament bracket until the 11am submission deadline on opening Thursday that bracket pickers across the world have to make their 63 selections. It implies another meaning: a ton of thought, information, analysis, and effort are 'crunched' into a short amount of 'time.' They are exhausting, nerve-racking, secretive, overwhelming, and yes, most of all, exciting. Everyone -- bracket scientists, sports media, average Joes, and even first-time bracket pickers -- does it. Yet, bracket scientists shouldn't be doing what the non-scientists are doing. We should be doing much of our thought, information, analysis and effort during Brunch Time, not Crunch Time. When everyone is having their cup of tea, doing their run-of-the-mill activities, or otherwise being complacent until lunch time or even closing time arrives, this Brunch Time should be our Crunch Time when we get ahead of the curve and do the things that the non-scientists do during their Crunch Time. So that's what we're going to do right now. We are going to warm up the crystal ball in December's Brunch Time (not in March) in order to be better prepared for the real Crunch Time.

Investigating the Aggregation Model

You may have seen the term Aggregation Model (AM) used throughout PPB (Examples: Link #1 and Link #2). I was even going to do a full write-up about it in Mar 2016, but the article disappeared from my hard-drive and I had to leave you with only the hard data. I have re-written the whole article, and hopefully I didn't forget anything from the first one. Enjoy!

The Aggregation Model

The AM is a predictive bracket tool that displays the sum of all seeds for each and every round of the NCAA Tournament. Peter Tiernan from Bracket Science used a metric known as the Mad-o-meter® (not sure if it was trademarked, but giving credit to be safe), and it is an aggregation of the tournament as a whole. The AM breaks down the M-o-M aggregation to the round-level (R32, S16, E8, F4, CG, NC), and its predictive ability works best for some rounds more than others. Up to this point, PPB has focused primarily on the AM for the Elite 8 (E8AM) for this reason, but in this article, I will look at it for all rounds with a greater emphasis on the rounds for which the AM works better.