The Whizz team has caught the March Madness fever, and we’re filling out our brackets. Here’s the question, who has the best chance of winning – the basketball enthusiast, the in-house statistician, the complete novice, or the person somewhere in the middle? Does being in the know truly matter, or are you just as likely to score the winning bracket with random picks and a bit of luck?
Water cooler banter led to the Math-Whizz March Madness Challenge. Six members of the Math-Whizz team have put statistics versus randomness to the test. The Math-Whizz roster (shown below) ranks each team member by interest in basketball with the mathematical outliers being Ben Keogh, statistician and Kevin Judd, mathematician/former math teacher. To make things interesting we created two control brackets: one has each game determined by a coin flip and one has the top seed winning each game with the final four determined based on National Ranking.
Round by round the results will be examined, numbers run and results evaluated to determine who has the better chance of creating the winning bracket. We will keep you posted on who is leading the scoreboard – those in the know or those who are just lucky. Stay tuned to watch the Whizz Madness.
Fun Math around the NCAA Basketball Tournament Brackets:
What are the odds for the Coin Flip bracket to get every game correct in a 64 team tournament?