Using Data to Win Your Office’s ‘March Madness’ Pool

It’s that time of year when your office mates start saying “bracketology,” when everyone claims to know all about college basketball, and questionable research says businesses stand to lose an estimated $1.2-billion in productivity for every hour employees spend focused on the NCAA tournament instead of their jobs.

It’s also the time of year when some news organizations try to tell you how to use statistics to fill out your bracket and win your office pool (or, this year, $1-billion from Warren Buffett and Quicken Loans). Still others produce creative “alternative” brackets based on variables that are mostly unrelated to the actual game of basketball. Call it March Madness for the data geek in all of us.

Slate takes the cake this year, with an interactive bracket that allows you to choose from 15 metrics to determine your tournament champion. They range from the potentially relevant “tournament history” to the patently absurd “team with a dog mascot.” Harvard University, not surprisingly, wins the tournament if you look at average SAT score, while George Washington University, which made the tournament this year for the first time since 2007, wins if you go by highest sticker price.

Of course, we’ve written about how net price is a better metric than sticker price for college, and Robert Kelchen agrees—at least as far as March Madness is concerned. The assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University filled out his second annual “Net Price Madness” bracket on the basis of which school had the lower average net price. This year’s winner is the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Good thing for the Ragin’ Cajuns that Mr. Kelchen didn’t go with graduation rates—only 44 percent of Lafayette’s students graduate in six years, placing them in the bottom 10 of tournament teams.

Inside Higher Ed also has an annual alternative bracket, which uses each team’s NCAA academic-progress rate, a measure of players’ classroom performance. The University of Kansas wins that bracket, a somewhat more likely proposition than the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s winning it all. (Sorry, Cajuns.)

Last year The New Yorker did pretty well in its pool by picking winners according to who spends the most money on men’s basketball. That method produced 36 correct picks out of 63 games. (By comparison, the winner of ESPN’s Bracket Challenge last year picked 48 correct games.) The magazine did particularly well in the Eastern region, where it correctly picked all but two of the games. It also correctly selected 11 of the Sweet 16 teams and four of the Elite Eight.

The New Yorker hasn’t made this year’s picks yet, so we thought we’d help out. This year’s winner (using 2012-13 financial data for men’s basketball) is the University of Louisville, which won the actual championship last year. (The magazine had Louisville falling to to Duke in the Elite Eight in its bracket last year.)

As The New Yorker’s Nick Traverse pointed out last year, budget data can be fairly predictive of basketball success. Twice since 2000, the team that won was also the team that spent the most money (Syracuse in 2003 and Duke in 2010). And the winner of the tournament has always been among the top 18 institutions in terms of basketball budget. The average NCAA champion spends $7.2-million; 18 tournament teams spent more than that this year, all of them ranking higher than a No. 10 seed.

President Obama has fourth-seeded Michigan State University ($9.5-million in men’s basketball expenditures) winning the tournament this year, beating the Louisville Cardinals ($15.6 million) in the championship game. But if basketball expenditures are any indication (which they very well may not be), it will be the Cardinals cutting down the net come April 7.

Click here to download the data we used to pick our bracket.