Those rambling wrecks from Georgia Tech are doing bettors a favor: They’ve run their Logistics Regression/Markov chain, a computerized college basketball ranking program, and it predicts Florida will win this year’s Final Four. The program has picked the men’s basketball national champ in three of the last five years, but this is the first year the 10-yeara old program didn’t spit out the number one seed as the eventual winner. Florida is seeded third. The program further predicts that the Final Four dance card up will be: Florida, Louisville, Indiana, and Gonzaga.
The program uses scoreboard data to create weekly rankings of all 347 Div I teams. It also looks at every game to factor in margins of victory and where each game is played. Georgia Tech’s program has been shows to be the most accurate ranking system over the last decade, outperforming 80 others, including the NCAA’s own Rating Performing Index, which is used to decide what teams get into the tournament.
If you’re headed to Vegas with this information, you might also want to put some “long-shot” money on Bucknell, Davidson, Belmont, and St. Mary’s, a bevy of small schools the program indicated could be this year’s Cinderella teams that make the Sweet Sixteen. And if you’re looking for losers, the program says Memphis, UCLA, and Butler are teams most in danger of going home early. Each of these teams is seeded sixth. (For more information, click here.)
I’ll be coming back to this entry after the winner is decided to tally up GiT's success.
