NCAA Tournament First Round Projections

The tournament tips off tonight with the first two games of the "First Four" in Dayton. For those of you ferociously filling out your brackets and contemplating over what upsets to pick, I am here to help.

I have modeled EVERY first-round game, including the First Four, and attained a win probability for the projected winner of each game. Using the power rankings I developed and detailed in my inaugural article, I ran a logistic regression model to generate win expectancy for each team in each game. Because the vast majority of the nearly 900 games the model was developed off of were not on a neutral court, but rather on the home court of one of the teams, I included a binary variable classifying each game as "Neutral" or "Non-Neutral". In doing so, I was able to account for home-court advantage in the non-neutral games and subsequently neutralize (yes, pun intended) home-court advantage in tournament games, as they are all played on neutral sites. After a handful of iterations and combinations of variables, I found the best model includes just the difference in power ranking between the two teams, and whether or not the game was played on a neutral court. Enough jibber-jabber let's get to the results.

It's not surprising to see the 1 and 2 seeds dominating the top, however North Carolina being the "weakest" 1 seed with nearly a 10% greater chance of victory than the overall number-one and reigning champ UConn caught me somewhat off-guard. The real value though comes when looking at the bottom half, this is where you can spot the upsets. For example, a recent article by Neil Paine, stated that, dating back to 2002, 13 seeds have approximately a 30.1% chance of beating their 4-seed opponent (interesting article, give it a read!). Based on this model, Samford has a 42.7% (!!) chance to beat Kansas, and that's without taking into consideration the injury status of stars Kevin McCullar Jr. and Hunter Dickinson. But that's just one case. I pulled together a list of my most probable/intriguing upsets that you may want to consider while filling out your brackets.

Let's be honest, this will all probably blow up in our faces by Thursday afternoon. One thing is for certain though, the NCAA Tournament is an event like no other, so enjoy!