Thursday, March 15, 2007

Madness x Madness

Don't talk to me about March Madness. Whatever level of interest in the NCAA tourney may occur in your household, it cannot compare to the insanity here. And Dave doesn't even like college basketball. No, my friends, but he is a math geek.

Three years ago he and a tech friend at work complied years of statistics on the tournament to help them predict who may win. Not on actual team, but on the rankings of teams in general. Like how often an 8 beats a 9, how often a 1 makes it to the Final Four, etc. Then they created an Excel program to spit out thousands of iterations based on those statistics.

Then the true madness begins. Starting on Sunday, Dave created 100 boards. 100. Using as many screen names as he can through multiple websites he made 100 different scenarios based on statistical predictions. Tonight he'll watch the ESPN ticker to highlight and update his brackets, sort them by percentage correct, and track his national ranking. But not actually watch the games.

What truly makes my head spin is that he realizes how impossible it is to accurately predict the winner this way--or even the Final Four. It would take the program like 21,000 iterations to come close. I'm just glad we have two TV's with cable now. Hey, maybe he'll win the flat screen TV. Then next year we can do all this in HD. Yea.

I need to find a book.

1 comment:

Goes On Runs said...

wow! and J just picks FL every year.