I was a bit concerned when I was asked to talk with Paul Bessire of PredictionMachine.com because I hate doing interviews with guys who do 25 interviews in a day. They get tired of answering the same questions over and over again and it turns into autopilot mode.
This is not that interview, and it turned into one of my favorite shows in a long time. If you’re listening CLICK THIS LINK TO FOLLOW ALONG. It’s heady number crunching and it helps to have a something to look at. But honestly, I’m convinced this system could work.
Paul mentions that they have a book on every single player in college basketball, and use that to create team profiles. The team profiles are used to run 50,000 tournaments to determine the probability of how far each team will go. It’s rather incredible.
We run through the chances of too many teams to just list one or two here (ahem Villanova), so please listen if you want your bracket to do well. Or if you’re a stat geek.
Following the interview, Nick and I somehow turn it into a Sabermetric vs. the eye test with Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, responding to a comment on TSB from my Pujols-Howard post. Plus, we talk about Tiger Woods return and if the news warranted wall-to-wall coverage when the story really came out last week that it was likely his return would come at Augusta. Has the situation become overcovered? It did for me when I turned on ATH and Bill Plaschke said Tiger is being selfish for coming back at The Masters. That’s when he put on the leather jacket and waterskis for all of sports media and I turned my brain off.
Thanks for listening. . Zoe’s picks will be posted later today. And congrats to the guys at The 700 Level.
Tags: Brackets, March Madness, NCAA, Paul Bessire, Tiger Woods
DRIVING : MOC…
DRIVING…