college football ratings system<\/a> before they expanded into this year\u2019s Giant Killers blog, where they had the epiphany to classify \u201cgiants\u201d and \u201ckillers\u201d into four categories (or \u201cfamilies\u201d as ESPN calls them).<\/p>\n\u201cWe try to group the giants into styles and we try to group the killer into styles, and we look historically at which kinds of giants are able to neutralize which types of killers and we look at which types of killers tend to play well against which types of giants. We factor that into the analysis as well, so the matchup is important,\u201d Hutson said. \u201cBy doing the clustering analysis, we were able to identify teams and put them in a box.\u201d<\/p>\n
Interesting, to be sure, but let\u2019s get to the real question: Has Furman brought the world any closer to Warren Buffet\u2019s billion? The proof is in the predicting, though it\u2019s important to understand what that means before drawing conclusions.<\/p>\n
The analysis wasn\u2019t meant to name winners and losers with certainty. That\u2019s mathematically impossible, as Bouzarth points out. \u201cIt\u2019s all about probability, and you\u2019re never going to get a 1.0 in probability,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
So in that sense, there is no way it could fail or succeed. What it could do, however, is conclude which teams had the best odds of pulling an upset, followed by a comparison with the teams that actually DID pull upsets. Tennessee, Harvard, North Dakota State and Stephen F. Austin were deemed most likely to kill a giant, and guess what?<\/p>\n
They all did.<\/p>\n
The latter three were 12 seeds given approximately a one in three chance of victory in the round of 64. Tennessee, meanwhile, was given more than a 70 percent shot of knocking off Massachusetts as an 11 seed, and the Vols throttled the Minutemen on their way to the Sweet 16.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were super confident about that,\u201d Hutson said.<\/p>\n
It gets better. The system gave Kentucky the best chance among the 8 and 9 seeds of defeating a No. 1, which is precisely what the Wildcats did in upsetting Wichita State in their march to the Final Four.<\/p>\n
On the flip side, the trio\u2019s list of \u201cshaky giants\u201d didn\u2019t end up being very shaky outside of a Creighton\u2019s round-of-32 blowout loss at the hands of Baylor. Wisconsin is in the Final Four for the first time, while Michigan, Arizona, and Iowa State all made it to at least the Sweet 16.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s favorite Louisville, ousted well short of the national title by resurgent Kentucky.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of this is based on trying to predict on who\u2019s going to outperform their basic skill. How do you know when somebody\u2019s going to have a very good night and somebody\u2019s going to have a very bad night? You have to admit that a giant factor in all of this is luck, so at a certain point we\u2019re going to get diminishing returns,\u201d Keating said. \u201cIt\u2019s never going to be totally predictable because you\u2019re trying to predict a surprise.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clustering analysis was able to pin down matchups that would favor certain underdogs whether they took a lot of 3s or tried to slow the game down, but there is one factor that seems to consistently give teams a better chance of winning regardless of style. \u201cRebounding,\u201d Harris says. \u201cThat\u2019s probably the biggest thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf your coin is biased so that you get a head 48 percent of the time and I get a head 37 percent of the time, you\u2019re going to win this game as long as you can flip it as many times as me,\u201d Hutson added. \u201cSo I\u2019ve got to do things to keep you from doing that. That\u2019s the key.\u201d<\/p>\n
All three professors thoroughly enjoyed watching the fruits of their labor play out on television and hope to continue the project next year, this time with student involvement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were a lot of really tight games, so that was fun for us with our models in trying to see these upsets. . . Even the ones that we didn\u2019t win, we felt like we won because the gap was way smaller than some people thought,\u201d Bouzarth said.<\/p>\n
As confident as she is in the process, however, not even Bouzarth, who earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from North Carolina, is quite ready to trade humanity for cold, hard numbers when it comes time to fill out her bracket. Other factors are still more important. \u201cI picked things like Mercer over Duke,\u201d she said. \u201cThe model didn\u2019t, but I had some insider information as a UNC fan that Duke might lose.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most of us think if only we research a bit more, think a little harder, watch a few extra games, we\u2019ll be able to brilliantly pick those upsets in our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":12950,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,50,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-mathematics","category-top-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}