Leading up to the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament, the Athletic has a bracket with projections expressed as win probabilities in each round. Surprise, Duke is heavily favored to win, which can only mean everyone’s brackets will be ruined early.
On methodology:
We create an offensive and defensive projection for every college basketball team using various box score metrics. These projections estimate how many points a team would score and allow in a game against an average opponent on a neutral court. We then assign a probability of how likely a team is to win a given game by adjusting for opponent, location and team health. Taking into account the bracket, we use the projections to simulate the tournament 200,000 times.
After those 200,000 simulations, we calculate how often a team is to make each round of the tournament and win the championship. For example, if a team has a 10 percent chance of making the Final Four, that means that they’ve made the Final Four in 10 percent of the simulations run.
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