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Peter Tiernan has been using stats to analyze March Madness for 22 years. He writes for CBSSports.com and has also contributed to ESPN.com and SI.com. His insights into the NCAA basketball tournament can help you build a better bracket.Sign-up questions? Click here.
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Category Archives: Basic Concepts
What all those columns in the stats sheet mean
I’ve fielded enough emails asking for a guide to the columns in the stats sheet, that I figured I ought to get after that. A couple years back, I made an effort to put a little triangle note beside each … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts, General News
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Do teams with better road records overachieve in the tourney?
Three members have asked me in the last couple weeks about whether having a good road/neutral record has an impact on tourney performance. I finally got some time tonight to do a quick PASE analysis on the subject. I’m glad … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts, Tourney Trends
12 Comments
Analysis of key performance indicators coming for Insiders
If it seems like the Bracket Science blog has gone a little quiet lately, it’s because I’ve spent the last week crunching serious numbers to find the factors that correlate most to tourney overachievement. This involved nearly a thousand queries … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts, Bracket Tools
2 Comments
What is baseline bracket prediction performance?
I’m here to tell you right now that nobody has a failsafe system for predicting the NCAA basketball tourney. As Nate Silver might say, filling out your bracket is an exercise in assessing probabilities. You’re not going to build a … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts, Bracket Tools, General News
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Possession-based data say Pitt’s a champ, but Louisville isn’t
Ken Pomeroy has been publishing tempo-free statistics for nine years now and basketball analysts are relying more and more on them to gain insights into the college game. If you follow this blog , you know that KenPom stats are … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts, Champ Credentials
8 Comments
Why automatically advancing top four seeds makes sense
When it comes time to fill out your bracket, you’ll have 63 match-ups to decide. I’m here to set your mind at ease: you probably shouldn’t even think twice about 16 of them. The stats say that picking any first-round … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts, Bracket Tools
5 Comments
Seed advancement probabilities
File this under “bracket pondering essentials.” If you’re going to use seeding as a guide to making your picks—and you should—you’ll need to know each seed’s probability of advancing from one round to another. These probabilities don’t take any factors … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts, Bracket Tools
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Bracketmaster basics
The Bracketmaster gives users a window into the database I’ve been building for 23 years on tourney stats. It enables you to submit queries to the database using any combination of 18 statistics. Then it returns the round-by-round record of … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts
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PASE and SOAR: two key tourney performance metrics
If you’re new to Bracketscience.com, you may have come across these two acronyms and wondered what the heck I was talking about. PASE and SOAR are two measures of tourney performance—the latter measures the frequency that a team overperforms in … Continue reading
Posted in Basic Concepts
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