Bringing the Fun Index to March Madness
Need to fill out your brackets? Try fun!
March Madness is upon us as the annual tournament kicks into high gear today. As per tradition, millions of brackets will be filled out in hopes that one of them will be perfect. Although the odds of that are astronomically low (1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808), it is still fun to compete against friends and family. For those that spent close attention to the season this year, it is most likely easier to get your selections in vs. those who haven’t really paid attention to the action. Unfortunately for me, I fall into the later of those categories.
If you haven’t paid attention to the season you may be scrambling to gain the information needed to complete your bracket. Lucky for you, I have brought a familiar concept to the hardwood: the fun index! For those that needed a refresher, the fun index is essentially various metrics meshed together into a composite index. The only difference in calculation this time is we will be weighting the metrics based on which metrics are more important (fun). The metrics we will use are from kenpom.com and are as follows based on importance (fun):
Adjusted Offensive Efficiency: Similar to the football index, I enjoy good efficient offensive basketball. Naturally this would have the most importance in our index.
Adjusted Tempo: High paced, up tempo basketball is always a sight to see. A team starts to go on a run, the crowd starts to get into it, and the other team has to take a timeout to try and figure out what the heck is going on. When your team is on the giving end, there is simply no better feeling.
Adjusted Overall Team Efficiency: Great overall teams are fun to watch, nothing to mysterious here!
Adjusted Defensive Efficiency: Defense is still important, albeit not as fun.
Luck: It is March Madness after all, we need a little bit of magic in our formula.
Here are the results of the fun index. I didn’t include a trend line, but you can see a slight downward trend as you get into the lower seeds, which makes sense given the advanced metrics we used in the formula. However, you can see some outliers. In the football fun index, Iowa’s offense was on the butt end of the jokes. This time they’re actually one of the more fun teams in college basketball, which is a nice change for the Hawkeye faithful. Alabama and North Carolina round out the middle seed outliers, while the South Dakota State Jackrabbits highlight the lower seeds.
That is all there is to it! A nice simple index to help fill out a bracket. I used it to partially fill out my bracket, while also mixing in some metrics and betting information. This is the bracket I finished with for the tournament:
Overall the Midwest region isn’t the most fun region, but Iowa is an outlier fun team and who I am taking to come out of this region. Assuming South Dakota State pulls off a first round upset (which appears to be a popular pick), we could be in for an exciting second round matchup with the Hawkeyes.
North Carolina is another one of the outlier fun middle seeds, so I have them going on a bit of a run in this region. Ultimately, Kentucky takes down a relatively fun region.
After the first two regions featured some upsets, we regress a little to relatively few upsets in the South region. This wasn’t done by design, it just sort of happened. Arizona is the second most fun team according to our index, so they get the nod in this region.
Finally, the West region. Another region with relatively few upsets, and Gonzaga coming out on top. Alabama is our last outlier fun middle seed, and could be a team to potentially make a run deep into the tournament.
Now that the Final Four is in place, the championship game features the top two teams in the fun index. I chose Arizona over Gonzaga because I have a feeling the friend pool I am in will have a lot of Gonzaga champions. A sprinkle of contrarianism will help you stand out in a crowded bracket pool, but just remember not to overdo it. It’s like spicing your food: if you do too much, that is all you will taste and it will not end up good.
Regardless of the approach you take in filling out your bracket, remember the number one objective is to have fun!
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