Nate Silver joins the Ohio State NCAA win crowd….

How We Made Our N.C.A.A. Picks

By NATE SILVER

I participated in my first N.C.A.A. tournament pool in 1992 when, as a 14-year-old, I correctly predicted sixth-seeded Michigan to reach the Final Four.

I don’t particularly remember what went into the prediction, other than that the pool offered some ridiculous bonus for picking lower seeds — and also, since I grew up in East Lansing, Mich., I could be pretty sure that nobody else would be willing to go all-in on the team from Ann Arbor. I’ve never been asked to return the 75 “units” I took in for finishing first, despite the fact that Michigan’s Fab Five had to forfeit its wins for recruiting violations.

This year, we’ve decided to do something a bit more scientific, analyzing the results for all tournament games since 2003 (a total of 512 games) and evaluating which factors best predicted success. Our forecast is here.

The goal is to have a system that makes good statistical sense and also makes decent basketball sense, as opposed to identifying a bunch of spurious correlations. There’s no Da Vinci code for winning the tournament; it’s just a matter of playing good basketball.

Let me give you an overview of the system; there’s more elaboration down below for those interested in the gory details.

The Simple Version

– First, we create a power rating for each team. The power rating is an aggregation of four computer ratings and two human ratings, all of which have performed well at predicting tournament games in the past:

Objective (computer) ratings:

a) Jeff Sagarin “predictor” ratings;
b) Ken Pomeroy Pythagorean ratings;
c) Joel Sokol LRMC rankings;
d) Sonny Moore power ratings.

Read more…

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