Monday, April 11, 2016

March Madness: It Didn't Happen Yet Again

It didn't happen yet again. In last month's NCAA "March Madness" men's college basketball championship, a number of 16 seeds have again failed to best the number 1 seeds. The histogram above shows the score differences in such matchings since 1985. It closely matches a normal distribution, allowing for us to estimate the probability that such an upset could happen as the area under the approximating bell-curve that falls beyond zero. Our estimated probability that a number 16 seed would beat a number 1 seed is 0.0208. It has risen a bit since our last view.

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