The national basketball champions have been crowned and the numbers tell a fascinating story.
Students and faculty in NDSU’s statistics department used a variety of statistical techniques to predict the outcome of the recently-completed NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. University of Connecticut teams won each event.
Their predictions were right more often than they were wrong – quite an accomplishment considering the tournaments were rife with upsets and tight games.
“We correctly predicted 62.6 percent of the men’s games and 76.2 percent of the women’s games,” said Rhonda Magel, department chair, noting the team correctly picked the women’s champion, runner-up and final four. “The surprising thing about the women’s tournament is that we were able to predict Maryland would get into the Final Four, as well as Stanford. UConn and Notre Dame were not really a surprise.”
While not as successful predicting the men’s tournament, Magel still seemed pleased with the result. “The men’s games were all really close this year. We did not predict Kentucky or UConn for the final,” she said. “We felt we did fairly well considering how some games were decided by only one or two points, or went into overtime.”
Magel and Gang Shen, assistant professor of statistics, worked with students Yingfei Mu, Bryan Rask and Wenting Wang to complete brackets for the tournaments.
In addition, they used an equation throughout the men’s games, keeping track of several differences between the two competing teams: number of free throw attempts, assists, defensive rebounds and turnovers.
As Magel explains the calculation, for each extra turnover, the opposing team will end up with an average of 1.6 more points. For each extra defensive rebound, the team will gain an average of 1.49 more points. One assist more than the opposing team will increase the team’s score an average of one-half point.
“In the final game, our equation ended up with a point spread of 6.63 in favor of UConn and the actual point spread was six,” Magel said. “For the NDSU and San Diego State game, our equation ended up with a point spread of 16.4 in favor of San Diego State and the actual point spread was 19. For the Elite Eight and Final Four games, the equation gave very close values to the actual point spreads.”
NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.