Why BracketBrains Can Help (aka Debunking the Media's Myths)
Every March, you turn on ESPN, pick up your local sports page, and adjust the dial to your favorite sports radio station. What you read and hear is as predictable as rain in Seattle -- dozens of "experts" (names withheld to protect the guilty) telling you foolproof ways to pick NCAA tournament winners.
This year, do yourself a favor. Have fun listening to them, but please, please don't base your bracket picks on what Pit Bull Rockawitz and the Dawg Pound over on SportzRap 550 AM may be saying about how Team XYZ just doesn't have the "mo" coming in to the big dance. Or how the tourney is all about guard play, and their backcourt just doesn't cut it because of youth and inexperience.
In fact, statistical analysis shows that the majority of these so-called "experts" and the conventional wisdom they preach are usually quite wrong. For example...
SAMPLE MYTH #1: Momentum coming into the NCAA Tournament is critical.
Here's a fun one. Everyone talks about how a team's momentum coming into the NCAA tournament is such an important factor. Are they on a hot streak or not? After all, if a team hasn't been winning recently, we can't expect them to suddenly turn it around in the pressure-cooker environment of the NCAA tournament. Right?
Wrong. From 1996-2004, teams that lost at least 5 of their last 10 games going into the tournament actually slightly outperformed expectations. Based on the historical performance of similarly seeded teams, one would have expected these "cold" teams to have compiled a record of 63-75. But they've gone 66-72.
SAMPLE MYTH #2: Teams that have proven they can pull out close games are good picks.
A lot of people think that only the "cardiac" teams -- the squads that have proven their ability to win close games and pull out victories under pressure -- have what it takes to get far in the tournament. In fact, from 1996-2004, teams that won 68% or more of their close games (decided by 5 points or less) during the regular season went 164-158 in the NCAA Tournament.
That level of performance sounds OK, but it is misleading. Based on the historical performance of similar tournament seeds, these teams should have won eight more games (172) than they did. Believe it. Cardiac teams have significantly underperformed expectations in the NCAA Tournament!
We hope that these counterintuitive findings help open your eyes to how misleading some of the traditional approaches to evaluating NCAA tournament matchups can be. So have fun watching CBS Sportsline, reading your favorite columnist's opinions, and arguing with your friends about who choked this season and who's riding high into the big dance. Just don't let intuition or the media's biased opinions brainwash you as you make your 2008 bracket picks. You may still get lucky and win, but the odds are you won't.
That's where BracketBrains comes in. Using BracketBrains will help you incorporate the powerful intelligence gained through historical data-driven analysis into all of your March Madness picks -- both quickly and easily. Pit Bull and friends may talk a big game, but the numbers don't lie.
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