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The Geek’s Guide to NCAA Tournament Pools

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Ah, March. Spring is springing, the clocks have been turned forward, and at offices all across the country, people who’ve never seen a college basketball game are earnestly discussing Kansas’s starting five, and wondering why Kentucky got such a tough bracket.

Yes, it’s NCAA basketball tournament time, and that means it’s time to enter your office pool. We’ve got a different way of looking at the field of 64 teams, one that just might help you bring home the prize.

Here’s the idea: Generally, most people’s picks in tournament pools look pretty similar — after a while, you start to have consensus. For instance, the millions of users in ESPN’s online pool almost all think that the top four seeds will win their first game (and they’re almost certainly right, as a top seed has never lost to a 16 seed in the first round).

But you can look at each round, and each game, and see the percentage of players who’ve picked which winner. Call it the wisdom of the crowd, which is pretty darn good. Even with the unpredictability of the tournament, the crowd’s consensus picks usually finish in the 80th percentile or so.

That’s not good enough to win your pool, though. You need to be looking for teams that the crowd is undervaluing, or overvaluing. That’s what we’ve done in the chart below:

Here’s what those numbers mean. They’re the difference between the crowd’s pick at ESPN, and the statistical predictions of two top college basketball analysts: Ken Pomeroy, and Jeff Sagarin. Both sets of ratings can be used to calculate a team’s expected chance to reach a certain round of the tournament.

I’ve then taken the two ratings and averaged them together, and then compared them with the ESPN percentages. A positive number means that the stats say a team is more likely to win than the crowd thinks; negative means that the stats say they’re more likely to lose than the crowd thinks.

Games that have more than a 10 percent difference are highlighted — green showing teams that are good bets compared to the crowd, and red showing bad bets.

So, you’ll see that most of the top seeds are highly inflated, especially Kentucky. Kansas is also overvalued by the crowd, although they are still the statistical guys favorite to win it all. It’s just that 38.8 percent of ESPN users are picking the Jayhawks as national champs, while the statheads peg them with a 27.6 percent chance. But Duke isn’t getting much respect from the crowd, and might be a good pick.

Three teams jump out to me as very undervalued by the masses — Wisconsin, Brigham Young, and Florida State. Objective ratings give Wisconsin a 28.9 percent chance of reaching the Elite 8, while only 6.8 percent of ESPN users have picked them to do so. That’s a big gap, and one you might be able to exploit.

The single biggest gap between the two sets of picks? Old Dominion in its first-round matchup against Notre Dame. Only 14.9 percent of ESPN users have picked ODU to knock off the higher-seeded Irish, while the stats actually make them a slight favorite, at 50.85 percent.

As I wrote last year, this is a high-risk, high-reward strategy. Stick with the crowd and you probably won’t win, although you likely won’t finish last. But since most pools only pay for the top few slots, you might as well go for it, right?

Chris Wilson has a story up on Slate, an update of one he did last year, that covers some similar ground to this — it’s a good read, so check it out.

The complete Google Docs spreadsheet is available, so you can see the math. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions, and how you do in your pool!

Photo: Kentucky guard John Wall (11) scores against Tennessee during the second half of an NCAA college basketball semifinal round game at the Southeastern Conference tournament on Saturday, March 13, 2010, in Nashville, Tennesse. Kentucky won 74-45.
Associated Press/Wade Payne

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Golf Short Game Gets Statistical Upgrade

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The old saying goes, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” After all, about 40 percent of a golfer’s strokes in a given round are taken on the green. But golf statistics tend to treat all putts the same. The PGA Tour reports putts per round, and putts per green in regulation, but neither of those capture how difficult the putts are.

For instance, a golfer who’s a whiz with his approach shots would end up taking fewer putts in a round, since they’re shorter, more makeable putts. That doesn’t mean he’s a good putter, though, that means he’s a good iron player. What you need is some way to evaluate the difficulty of the putts a player is making, and see how that compares to his peers.

That’s just what researchers at MIT have done. Using data from the tour’s ShotLink system, and after developing the same sort of Markov chain model often used by baseball analysts, the MIT team was able to calculate the putts gained or lost per round per player. It isolated putting skill by correcting for the distance and difficulty of each putt, evaluating the player’s performance against the expected performance of a PGA tour professional.

Golf is ameniable to the same sorts of analysis that baseball is, given that there are descrete states before and after each shot. This paper is a super-interesting start, but look for more people mining the ShotLink data in the future.

How to Catch a Tiger: Understanding Putting Performance on the PGA Tour (via Wall Street Journal)

Photo: pmaura/flickr, CC

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Google Maps Adds Cycling Directions

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Great news today for cyclists, as Google has added cycling-specific directions for 150 cities around the country to Google Maps. The tool will try and route you on bike trails where possible, as well as avoiding hills.

How’s it work? We plugged in the Wired office, and asked Google to get us on our bikes to the Golden Gate Bridge. The route was the exact one that the experienced cyclists here would choose, which bodes well for the bike smarts of the algorithm.

That algorithm doesn’t just try to use bike trails and lanes, but it also tries to avoid busy streets and intersections. You can read more about the features and the way it tries to use the data at Google. You can even export the route to Google Earth, which could be great for racers as well as commuters. Cool stuff!

Biking Directions Added to Google Maps (Official Google Blog)
It’s Time to Bike (Google LatLong Blog)

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Evidence Mounts in Favor of Compression

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Can the clothes you wear after exercise help you recover more quickly? That’s the claim that makers of compression gear have been making for several years — that wearing tight gear can help increase blood flow, allowing the waste products that build up after you exert yourself to be flushed from your muscles, helping you feel better and stronger after exercise than if you didn’t wear the gear.

I’ve been using compression tights after hard cycling rides for a couple of year, and do feel a difference in my recovery and soreness. Among professional cyclists, compression tights are standard gear almost any time they’re off the bike. But there haven’t been a ton of scientific studies that try and quantify the effects of compression on recovery.

A study in the new issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research used 20 subjects in a randomized study to see if using compression helped in recover after they did a weightlifting workout. The results:

A whole body compression garment worn during the 24-hour recovery period after an intense heavy resistance training workout enhances various psychological, physiological, and a few performance markers of recovery compared with noncompressive control garment conditions. The use of compression appears to help in the recovery process after an intense heavy resistance training workout in men and women.

This is very good news for makers of compression garments, who can now point to a pretty solid looking study. The subjects who wore compression garments not only reported feeling better, but they did better in some more rigorous measurements of recovery, including swelling.

Effects of a whole body compression garment on markers of recovery after a heavy resistance workout in men and women.

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Say Hello to NCAA Vault, Adieu to Productivity

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It’s March, which can only mean we’re on the cusp of that Great American Workplace Productivity Suck known as the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament. Usually, the three weeks of March Madness are passed by updating office-pool rankings, watching split-screen highlights on CBS, and checking if you still qualify for Yahoo’s $1 million grand prize for submitting a perfect bracket.

But today, the college basketball bigwigs have upped the ante. In partnership with Thought Equity Motion, the NCAA has launched the aptly named Vault, which contains full, commercial-free footage of 150 tournament games from the past decade — every Sweet 16 game on to the championship from 2000 through last year. More so, engineers have indexed every game with nearly 6,000 combined metadata tags, so fans can easily filter incredible dunks, blocks, buzzer beaters and more. If you prefer, you can also sort by team, year or player.

More than anything, it’s the blazing-fast video-loading and incredible wealth of metadata that make the site shine. Rather than just dropping in 45-second clips of individually great moments, clicking on a game clip will drop you directly into that moment in that game.

Say you want to relive Mario Chalmers’ game-tying three for Kansas against Memphis in the 2008 championship. When you’re done watching, you can just hunker down and let the game keep playing, on through the end of regulation and then overtime, all commercial-free and with nary a buffer. Of course, the site only works well if you have a large viewing screen, so those users hunched over a netbook or smallish laptop could find themselves constantly scrolling through their browser window while navigating the extensive UI.

The effort kicked off last summer, when Denver-based Thought Equity (which was already working on digitizing the NCAA’s extensive archive) started collaborating with the NCAA on “how to unlock the value of NCAA.com,” says Greg Weitekamp, the NCAA’s director of broadcasting. “For a while, we were very protective of the copyright, and you have to be very careful in terms of allowing all that content out. As our relationship progressed, we started saying, ‘Look, this is a digital world, the content can be out there, and it can help drive your fanbase.’”

The first time he entered the Vault, Weitekamp pulled up the 2007 Sweet 16 matchup between the University of Florida and Butler University, his alma mater. Before he knew it, 45 minutes had gone by and he was officially sucked in. “I thought, ‘Well, if this is happening to me, I can’t imagine how other people are going to love it,’” he says.

Kevin Schaff, Thought Equity’s CEO, likens the Vault’s capabilities to that of a “third generation” of sports-media–archive distribution, following in the path set forth by ESPN Classic and broadband. Both parties say it’s possible that more men’s basketball games — as well as other collegiate sports — could be added to the Vault over time. “The NCAA had the foresight to preserve every second of every game,” Schaff points out, “and that sort of dedication allows these types of effort to come through.”

Of course, the traffic numbers and ad dollars will have a lot of say in whether that expansion comes to fruition. “The business model will have to prove itself,” Weitekamp says. “There’s a lot of resources that have been put into it, and CBS is out there trying to sell out. So if it’s successful, then naturally we’ll expand it.”

But starting today, fans can share Vault highlights with others using direct URLs, as well as having Click to Post functionality built in for Twitter and Facebook users. And with an accessible API, there’s still more potential for the NCAA Vault as time goes on.

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World Cup Uniforms Now Greener, Leaner

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For this summer’s World Cup in South Africa, Nike has introduced what they’re touting as the most environmentally friendly soccer uniforms ever to grace the pitch.

In just 100 days, 32 countries will battle throughout nine South African cities for the right to earn soccer’s most prestigious trophy. Nine of those squads – including the United States – will be outfitted with Nike jerseys made from recycled polyester. According to the company, each will be comprised of eight recycled plastic bottles.

With this green jersey effort, Nike prevented (by its calculations) nearly 13 million plastic bottle from entering global landfills. And besides being good for the environmental, the new threads are designed to keep players drier and (most importantly) help them maintain their optimum core temperature while hoofing it around the field for 90 minutes a pop (assuming there’s no extra time). The sides of each jersey have ventilation zones that comprise as many as 200 miniscule holes to allow air circulation, and the tighter-fitting jerseys are optimized to be more aerodynamic, stretching 10 percent more than previous uniforms.

You can check out all the jerseys on NikeSoccer.com starting Wednesday. Even cooler for the American team is that this year’s uniforms honor those worn by the 1950 World Cup team, which defeated England 1-0 in the biggest upset in American soccer history.

The United States’ first-round foe this June 12 in Rustenburg? Oh, yeah. Game on.

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Crosby Give Games Perfect Ending for Canada

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Canada ends these Olympic Games with 14 gold medals. But looking at the hundreds of thousands of exuberant Canadians who flooded the streets after Canada’s 3-2 win in the men’s hockey gold medal game against the United States, you get the feeling that if Canada would have only won one, that would have been OK. Just as long as it was men’s hockey.

The golden goal came 7:40 into overtime, as Sidney Crosby slid the puck past American goalie Ryan Miller. Crosby, the biggest star in Canada before the goal, should find himself launched onto the Canadian equivalent of Mt. Rushmore, alongside Gordie Howe and Wayne Gretzky. Crosby, who led the Pittsburgh Penguins to a Stanley Cup title last season, had missed several opportunities, including a breakaway late in the third period that would have sealed the game. The US went on to score a goal minutes later, tying the game at 2 with just 24 seconds remaining.

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The game was an epic. Seriously, if you’ve never been a hockey fan, watch it. It had everything — good skating, tons of emotion, hugely physical play, and outstanding goaltending. It was one of those rare moments that you knew you were watching something historic as it was happening.

Before the Games, I wrote: “It’s not that Canada cares about hockey: It thinks it is hockey.” What I meant by that is that the country defines itself through the game, and vice versa. Canadians think that the things that help you win hockey games — toughness, hard work, humility, determination, strength — reflect the best of their country. And the world of hockey, even at the highest level, takes on the humble, self-depreciating, slighly-stoic spirit of Canadians.

The Prime Minister of Canada was sitting about 20 feet behind me at the hockey game, and he was completely out of his mind. After Canada gave up the late goal to tie the game, he held his head in his hands, just another frustrated hockey fan.

There’s simply no analog to it in America. The best comparison I can think of it anywhere is soccer and Brazil, another game and nation that are inseparable.

That the win came against the States, as Canadians tend to refer to us down south, only made it more sweet. The US set an all-time record for medals won at a Winter Games here in British Columbia, with 37 total medals. Canada has 26 medals, placing third. But those 14 golds were the most of any nation, and for the happy Canadians packing the center of not only Vancouver, but cities around the country, those wins will not be forgotten.

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In talking to residents here over the last two weeks, I’ve heard again and again that they’ve never been more proud to be Canadian. Remember, this is a country that’s struggled for the past 30 years to simply keep itself whole.

So to hear chants of “Go, Canada, Go!” and to see thousands of people proudly wearing their red and black team Canada gear has been a revelation to Canadians from around the country. Walk down the street, and you’ll hear crowds spontaneously break into “O Canada,” looking for a way to express their identity to one another, and the world.

It’s been a great 17 days here at the Olympics, with huge highs and lows. But these Games end as one might have hoped — with a celebration, and newly forged relationships between people that sports foster like little else.

Photos: Chris O’Meara/AP Photo (Crosby); Bela Szandelszky/AP Photo (Crowd)

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Whistler Sliding Track Is Tough Sledding

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WHISTLER, British Columbia — Even if you don’t know much about bobsled, you can probably tell that the sled above, Austria’s AUT-1, isn’t doing well. In fact, it’s upside down, sliding along the track at over 140 kilometers an hour, the crew riding on their heads.

They weren’t alone in having trouble on the track at the Whistler Sliding Centre. In the first two runs of the men’s four-man bobsled competition, six different sleds flipped over, all coming off of turn 13 of the track. The turn is known as 50-50, named that by USA-1 pilot Steve Holcomb, who says those are a sled’s odds of making it through the turn.

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Holcomb stayed out of trouble on Friday, and put down the fastest run in each heat. If he can protect his 0.40 second lead, he will pilot the USA to its first gold medal in the four-man since 1948.

One of the crash victims was John Napier, the pilot of USA-2. “It was just one mistake,” said Napier. “When you’re going 95 miles per hour if you make a mistake there’s no time to catch up.”

Most of the trouble for the various pilots started higher on the track. Turn 13 demands a very precise entry to keep the sled from being flipped over onto its right side. Complicating the situation was the snow which was falling, and track conditions that the teams hadn’t seen previously.

“The ice is colder than in training, and that’s why it’s faster today,” said Kevin Kuske, a crewman on GER-1, driven by two-time defending gold medalist Andre Lange, who currently lies third, behind Holcomb’s USA-1 and Canada’s CAN-1, which has the benefit of more time on this track than any other team. Kuske’s German teammate, Karl Angerer, the pilot of GER-3, added, “It’s very fast today, which makes curves 11, 12, and 13 very difficult to control.”

The difficulty of that stretch puts a premium on good driving and track management. “It’s such a tricky track and such a fine line between right and wrong,” said John Jackson of Great Britain, who crashed his GBR-1 sled. Ivan Sola of Croatia’s CRO-1 was more blunt. “It is a very, very dangerous track. On normal tracks it’s impossible for all these guys to crash.”

There have been ongoing concerns about the safety of the Whistler track since the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili at the start of the Olympics. No one was seriously injured in any of the incidents on Friday.

“It’s more my ego that is bruised,” said Napier. “This is the biggest race of my life and I crashed.”

Photo: Michael Sohn/AP Photo

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How to Clock an Olympian

ti97_start-gunVANCOUVER, British Columbia — If a sport needs to be timed, measured or judged at the Olympic Games, Omega has its fingerprints on it.

It takes a team of more than 650 (including 400 local volunteers) to measure the Games, following about six years of set up. Basically, if it happens, Omega sees it. “Our goal is not to be Big Brother, but to help the federation,” said Christophe Berthaud, president of Omega Timing.

The most visible element is the starting gun used in the speed skating events, both short-track and traditional. The device looks more like a toy than an actual gun, for good reason. Given the political climate, it’s much more difficult to transport the traditional starter’s pistol through international checkpoints.

bug_olympics2010The gun uses LEDs to signal the start of the race and is hooked into the sound system to broadcast the bang of the starter’s pistol. The sound is purely digital and can be manipulated in various ways to produce the desired sound, dependent upon the configuration of the competition venue.

Omega uses a small, 75-gram GPS pack to track the cross-country events, and plans to use the technology for team sports like the Tour de France, illuminating how a team is moving in a pack and giving people insight into the strategies of the races.

The ski jumping measurements are taken by a set of four cameras hooked up to an image analysis system designed by Omega. Immediately after a jump, the system can calculate where the competitor landed to an accuracy of 10 to 20 centimeters, well under the half meter mandated by the rules.

Similar systems are in place for the figure skating events. The technical judges have access to a high-definition replay provided by Omega’s camera. All performances are stored in case of future questions about the judging.

The starter gates for the skiing event use a mechanism that allows the force from a skiier’s boot to power the device that sends the pulse to start the chronograph. It needs no outside power to function, but it’s used as a redundancy to the main signal. “You cannot say to a skiier that you have lost a pulse,” Berthaud said. “It’s not his problem.”

See the video below for more on the timing systems in use at the Olympics.

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Golden Games for Social Media

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Back in 1996, I was a wet behind the ears reporter at Sports Illustrated when I got a call from one of the editors there. The magazine was going to do something unprecedented — we’d publish a daily, four-color magazine covering the Atlanta Summer Olympics. Would I like to work on it?

Well, yeah.

Quite a technical feat, that magazine. We’d finish pages by 2 in the morning, and it would go on press in a town called The Rock, Georgia, shortly thereafter. We were often held up in production as we waited for the film our photographers used to get processed. Every once in a while, we’d use a digital photo from one of the newfangled cameras just on the market, although we fretted mightily about the quality. During spare moments working on those daily issues, I spend some time working on the rudimentary website we put together to cover the Games, hand coding pages in BBEdit.

On the early morning of July 27, 1996, a bomb went off in Centennial Olympic Park at 1:20 am, just as we were closing an issue. We waited a moment, hoping that it wasn’t the disaster we feared, but then we heard the sirens start as police and paramedics rushed to scene.

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I grabbed a reporter’s notebook and a cellphone, and headed out to see what had happened, and to try and help tell the story.

I was thinking of this yesterday, as I was reading Julia Mancuso’s real-time Twitter updates on my iPhone in between the two runs of the women’s giant slalom in Whistler. Grabbing that cellphone back in 1996 was a big moment — “I am now taking this mobile communication device with me.” (It was some giant Motorola model, and not the sort of thing you tossed in your pocket all day). Fourteen years later, my cellphone is a permanent appendage, and instead of having to track down an athlete to ask her what she was thinking about the disappointing circumstances of her first run, she was just telling me, unbidden.

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