NCAA March Madness Regression Report

Baseball has always been a game of numbers. Fans of the game have grown up being able to recite them by heart; Ted Williams’.406 batting average, Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs. These numbers hold a special place in the history of the game. Statistics such as batting average, wins, home runs, and runs batted in have always been there to tell us who the best players are. Your favorite player has a .300 batting average? He’s an all-star. He hit 40 home runs and batted in 120 runs? That’s a Most Valuable Player Award candidate. Your favorite team’s best pitcher won 20 games? He’s a Cy Young Award contender. These statistics have been used to evaluate player performance

Thesis: The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) formula has been used to determine the top twenty-five teams in NCAA Division I college since 1998. Many think this system is inadequate and should be changed. The alternative is a playoff system that would give more of the top teams a chance to be named the NCAA football National Champion.

The RPI includes the team’s winning percentage, their opponents winning percentage and even the opponents of their opponents winning percentage. This data is even further dissected into four quadrants that consider ‘good wins’ and even ‘bad losses’.

When you here the phrase “March Madness” what comes to mind? To millions of fans, March Madness is three weeks of intense basketball, played at a premier level, where anyone can be a fan. March Madness is the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that consists of 68 teams from around the country that are selected to participate in one of the worlds most celebrated sporting events.

Thesis: The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) formula has been used to determine the top twenty-five teams in NCAA Division I college since 1998. Many think this system is inadequate and should be changed. The alternative is a playoff system that would give more of the top teams a chance to be named the NCAA football National Champion.

Welcome back to the March Madness Mania blog. Once again, this has been a crazy week of college basketball. Top 10 teams have continued to fall and at this point it’s hard to predict who will grab the title this year. In this blog post I will be covering teams with March Madness stock that’s either rising or falling.

March madness is the appropriate term this month for any gardener in Indiana! My husband always reminds me it usually snows during bracket season. Don’t you just love the Final Four? Our family does the whole bracket thing; it is a long cherished Petty tradition full of healthy competition among neighbors and coworkers. March 14th-April 3rd the NCAA gets into high gear. A Reader’s Digest article noted that, “this year, “American companies would lose $1.9 billion in wages paid to unproductive workers spending company time on betting pool priorities.“

This year’s March Madness was full of surprises. Many big name teams that were expected to make it to the Final Four were knocked out in the first and second rounds. Only one top seed made it to the Final Four. Many of the predictions missed the mark completely, and many brackets were busted early. Here is a list of 10 March Madness predictions that were completely wrong.

These advanced metrics also provided much overdue improvements to old methods of baseball research. Old-timey statistics are inputted to the sabes machine, and the new output is “quantified baseball players’ performances based on objective statistical measurements, especially in opposition to many of the established statistics (such as, for example, runs batted in and pitching wins) that give less accurate approximations of individual efficacy” (Never, “Sabermetrics”). This revolution has given statistics a more clear meaning and true, measurable value for the first time. Scouting as well has been improved upon, as the five tools scouts grade on now have that measured value that scouts may refer to when making notes or personnel decisions.

March Madness is a widely known college basketball tournament that decides the champion of college basketball. I will not be discussing the teams of this year’s tournament as there are 68 of them and that would take way too long. Instead I will be talking about the history of March Madness, such as upsets and teams who do usually do well as well as teams who usually disappoint.

Every year, college football fans become engrossed with the weekly rankings released after the weekend’s games. Unsurprisingly, the standings often attract much criticism when a team is not placed as high as the fans feel it should be. Three of the most well-known ranking systems, based on algorithms as well as voting, include the Associated Press Poll, the Coaches Poll, and the College Football Playoff rankings. Often, there are discrepancies between each of these polls and fans are quick to make claims of bias when one poll ranks their team lower, or a rival team higher. However, in some cases, the bias claims are not necessarily false. Due to the nature of the polling system, a certain level of bias is simply unavoidable, and a more effective ranking system can only attempt to minimize this bias.

The March Madness tournament every year at the college level is the most exciting event in sports’ television. When the bracket is finally selected players from across the nation watch the selection show who will get the chance to play in the tournament. Television networks and universities make big money during the tournament, and often pass that funding on to other student athletes so all athletes benefit from the event and should support it.

Statistics in baseball have always existed on a player and team basis, with some common statistics being hits, runs, earned runs, runs batted in, home runs, etc. Since the publication of Bill James’ abstract (1986), however, there has been large growth of interest in baseball data and analytics, and, more specifically, a large growth of interest in a branch of baseball statistics known as sabermetrics. This branch of statistics has been further spurred on by the publication of Moneyball (Lewis, 2003), and even more so by the movie debut of Moneyball in 2011. Sabermetrics uses baseball’s common statistics and creates a statistic that more efficiently determines the performance of baseball players.However, there is still some

The Southeastern conference was created in 1932 (Johnson, 2006). It is an American college athletic conference whose schools are located mainly in the southeastern part of the United States. The conference’s headquarters are in Birmingham, Alabama. It participates in the National Collegiate Athletic Association division I in athletic competitions. For football it is part of the Football Bowl Subdivision. The SEC was the first NCAA Division I conference to hold a championship game for college football and was one of the founding members for the Bowl Championship Series. The Southeastern conference is regarded as one of the most successful sports conferences in terms of wins, and financially.

My audience is athletic trainers at the National Coaching Conference. Attendees of this conference are coaches, educators of coaches, sport science researcher, and students. They can use their extensive knowledge of coaching to develop a plan of action for the collection of coaches, across the nation, to take to combat eating disorders among athletes. The development of new regulations and educational requirements for coaches can only happen if a large number of coaches or coach educators are on board.