Conference tournaments got under way today with the 1st Round of the Big South and Horizon tournaments. This year I’m going to put my predictions on “paper” and compare them to some other predictions out there, notably Ken Pomeroy’s Log5 predictions and Team Rankings conference tourney predictions. If you know of any other posted predictions out there, let me know.
My predictions as well as KenPom and TeamRankings give the percentage chance of each team advancing to each round of every conference tournament. To grade each set of predictions, I’ll use the sum of squared error for each game winner. For example, let’s take Ken Pomeroy’s prediction of Charleston Southern in the Big South tournament:
Qtrs Semis Final Champ 1S Char Southern 100 77.2 50.5 31.6
So Charleston Southern has a 100% chance of reaching the quarterfinals (they have a bye), a 77% chance of reaching the Semifinals, 51% chance at making the final, and a 32% chance of grabbing the conference’s automatic bid. If Charleston Southern were to make the semifinals, for instance, KenPom’s prediction would receive (1 – .772)^2 “error points”, which comes out to .052. The fewer the error points, the better the predictions did. If, for instance, Longwood reaches the semis, KenPom’s ratings would suffer for their 2% prediction of that happening. That would give (1 – .020)^2, or .960 error points. In fact, Longwood did pull of the 1st Round upset and is just one game from reaching the semis.
It’s finally March and I see no reason why we need to wait for Selection Sunday to fill out some brackets when we have 31 perfectly good conference tournaments to predict. Let the Madness begin.