UPDATED 3/21/2011 - Results through the Sweet 16 Round

The NCAA College Basketball Tournament is hugely popular and once again, President Obama has shared his bracket selections for this year's tourney.  Here is his bracket:

Notice that he advanced all the #1 seeds to the Final Four which seems like the easy thing to do but he also has some upsets selected in the earlier rounds.  What do you think about his selections?  Let us know your thoughts on the President's bracket and this years tournament!

Tourney Format History

From 1985 to 2000, college hoops fans enjoyed the madness of March watching 64 teams battle their way through a 6 round bracket tournament to determine the best team in college basketball and crowning the national champion.  After 15 years of perfection, the 65 team format was adopted in 2001 to accommodate an extra automatic bid for the newly formed Mountain West Conference.  The extra team meant that the 64th and 65th seeded teams as determined by the NCAA Selection Committee would play a single early game, called the "Play-In Game", played between Selection Sunday and tipoff of the first game of the bracket of 64 on Thursday in order to determine the last spot in the tourney, last spot being the #16 seed playing in the region against the overall #1 seed.

How We Handled 65 Teams

The 65 team format put a minor kink in everyone's friendly office pool bracket.  At PoolHost.com, we've always excluded the play-in game from our system, leaving the 64 team bracket untouched.  The undetermined #16 seed spot would be left as TBD until it was decided and users could still pick that spot if they felt that either play-in team would beat the #1 seed (some people feel lucky!).  Once the play-in winner was determined our system automatically updated that slot on each person's bracket to the team's name.

Expansion To 68 Teams

In an effort to dodge some of the controversy in years past over the fate of the so-called "bubble" teams that didn't make the Big Dance, the NCAA this year has expanded its format to include 3 additional teams making for a total of 68 teams getting invitations to the tourney.  There will now be 8 teams competing for the final four spots in the tourney with the final 4 automatic qualifiers playing for two #16 seed spots and the final four at-large bids playing for two at-large positions that will be either #11 or #12 seeds in their regions.

How We'll Handle The New Format

The "First Four" games (as they'll be called this year) that determine the last four spaces in the bracket of 64 will be played on Tuesday, March 15th and Wednesday, March 16th before the traditional first tip on Thursday, March 17th.  Because of the small window of time between Selection Sunday, March 13th and these First Four games, there is no way we could expect our users to get their full brackets completed in such a short amount of time.  Instead, we'll only be scoring the traditional bracket as we always have.  The last four spaces on the bracket will be marked as TBD and will still be pickable, just like the single play-in spot in years past.  As the First Four games are played, the bracket and user picks will update automatically to reflect the team names for these undetermined spots.  Users will continue to be able to make or change picks up until the tip-off of the first game of the full bracket on Thursday, March 17th.

We're looking forward to getting feedback on the new format and how our system handles it.  As always, all user input is appreciated!

PoolHost.com Team

In spite of the fact that random events like injuries and weather can affect outcomes in your friendly fantasy league, big business (read the major sports leagues, network TV, and online sports portals) were able to convince Congress that fantasy sports are games of skill and therefore fantasy league participants should be allowed to pay to play and win prizes including cash without them being considered gambling.  Games that fall into the category of fantasy must involve the selection of individual players where their performance earns you points, not simply selecting entire teams to win in given match-ups.

But, do pick'em games require some level of skill?  Does analysis of team or player stats along with game conditions lead to a higher percentage of correct picks during the course of a season?  From our data, we can see that on average, PoolHost.com users pick straight winners roughly 60% of the time.  Those users picking against the spreads are correct just under 50% of the time (right where the odds makers want you!).

Still, there are some players who seem to be able to beat those percentages on a consistent basis, so are they using skill or knowledge of the game to pick winners at a higher percentage than others?

We decided to do an experiment this season to answer that question once and for all.  To do so, we created our own version of the old stock portfolio experiment where scientists had a monkey choose stocks from the newspaper by pointing or drooling on stock symbols to create a portfolio to see if he could outperform the so-called experts.

In our experiment, we put together a group of 17 guys, all with big egos, to participate in an NFL pool where picks are made against the spreads, picking 5 teams each week to cover and using the confidence format where picks are weighted from 5 to 1, 5 being most confident.  To this group of 17, we added another pick sheet we called "The Monkey".  Each week, the monkey was assigned random picks using the PoolHost.com "Random Picks" button.  In a weighted game, the random button gives you random teams AND random confidence weights.

So how did the monkey do?  With one week left in the regular season, he's in 4th place, seriously bruising the egos of at least 14 participants who strongly believed that they knew what they were doing each week.  Here is a chart showing the monkey's season rank by week:

As you can see, things looked discouraging for the majority of the homosapien participants during weeks 3 through 10!  The monkey was even able to do this well picking Detroit six times this season (sorry Lions fans!).

Of course this experiment is far from scientific but seems to indicate that little skill is involved when trying to pick winners or teams to cover the spreads.  But could a monkey put together a fantasy team that would do better than average or better than most?  If so, could fantasy sports still be considered games of skill?  We're guessing that lobby supporting this $1.5 billion dollar industry is ready to convince anyone who asks that it is.

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts!

PoolHost.com Team

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