‘March Mathness’ Final Four teams
Fairfield Middle School math teacher John Buelt’s class is studying probabilities and statistics and applying them to the NCAA Men’s College Basketball championship bracket. Based on historical tournament data only, here are their Final Four teams.
Class 1: Kentucky, Arizona, Villanova and Gonzaga with Villanova over Arizona for the title.
Class 2: Kentucky, Arizona, Virginia and Duke with Duke over Kentucky for the title
Class 3: Notre Dame, Wisconsin, Villanova and Duke with Villanova over Notre Dame for the title
Class 4: Kentucky, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Duke with Duke over Kentucky for the title
If you have ever wondered how many ways one could fill out an NCAA Men’s College Basketball championship bracket, the answer is nearly 9.3 Quintilian (which is a 1 followed by 18 zeros).
The probability to fill out a perfect bracket is next to impossible, said John Buelt, a 7th grade math teacher at Fairfield Middle School. You would have a significantly better chance at winning the multistate Powerball lottery (1 in 195 million) … or getting hit by an asteroid (1 in roughly 250,000).
And if all 24 students in Buelt’s afternoon math class worked collaboratively nonstop to fill out every possibility, it would take 2.1 trillion years.
“It’s staggeringly big, it’s astronomically big, it’s almost incalculable of how big that is,” said Buelt.
But that’s not stopping his classes from having a little fun with the NCAA bracket. Eight years ago, the Xavier Musketeers fan, developed “March Mathness” and to use the annual college basketball tournament to teach mathematical lessons.
“I’m a big NCAA basketball fan and I just think there are just so many practical applications of the math that falls within the bracket — at least the bracket itself and the different possibilities,” he said.
Looking at just the historical data of the bracket, they examine the different combinations of filling out a 68-team bracket. The results of getting that perfect bracket “are never very good,” he said.
The “March Mathness” brackets are based on weighted probabilities of previous tournaments — 5 seeds are more likely to get upset than a 2 seed, and a 1 seed has never been beat since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. And probabilities and statistics are in the fate of a pair of weighted dice.
Buelt’s project only takes historical tournament data into account, not the skills of the individual teams “because clearly this year Kentucky this year should have a decided advantage,” he said.
But in this project, Kentucky has just as good a shot at winning as much as any other number 1 seed.
Political statistician Nate Silver, who accurately predicted the 2008 and 2012 presidential wins of Barack Obama, has taken his skills of predicting outcomes based on math to the NCAA bracket. Before the tournament started, Silver predicted that Kentucky had a 41 percent chance of winning it all, followed by Villanova (11 percent), Wisconsin (10 percent) and Arizona (9 percent).
Two of Buelt’s classes have Villanova winning it all (oops, they were beat by North Carolina State on Saturday). His other two classes have Duke winning the title over Kentucky.
As a basketball fan, Bryce Davenport, 13, said he “can relate really well,” but he can’t relate to the fact his beloved Kentucky Wildcats weren’t predicted to win in the four classes, agreeing to the idea that science sometimes doesn’t equate to reality.
However, he said the math is “pretty cool.”
“I think it is pretty cool how you can determine the percentages of some teams that will win and some teams that won’t win and the different outcomes that will probably happen in each game,” he said.
Christopher Norris, 13, isn’t a basketball fan, but also enjoys the science behind the brackets and is amazed on the odds of getting a perfect bracket: “That is a very low percentage.”
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