Warning, analytics lovers: The next three weeks will not be easy.
Like most sports, college basketball has been steadily infiltrated by math types who have built careers on analyzing every win, every loss, every strength of schedule – all in the name of gaining that .1 percent edge for those who take this bracket-filling thing seriously.
Then the games start. March Madness. It’s a one-game, and, sometimes, one-shot proposition that may as well be called the Anti-Analytics championships.
Jim Valvano. Danny and the Miracles. George Mason. Bucknell over Kansas. VCU and Butler (The first time). From a pure statistics point of view, none of that should have happened. Because it did, we spend the next three weeks obsessing over upsets, unknowns and the unimaginable.
But the math geeks don’t give up.