Let it be known that, after leading my client's NCAA
tourney pool through the weekend, the second round
pushed me back into 2nd place in a field of 13, behind
my colleague Nathan.* Among the total pool of millions
of tourney players and high rollers, my percentile
ranking ranged from 96th to a current low of 84th.
What's pathetic is that, for someone who's never been
in a tournament pool before, who doesn't gamble and
really only pays attention to how UNC does at any
degree of detail (knowing starters' names, for
instance), and at a high level Duke and the rest of
the ACC, or at least the core ACC, how excited I would
be about all of this. I think it's the statistics that
turn me on, the objective measures of how many people
I seem to be outsmarting, even though I know there's a
very strong component of randomness to the whole
proceedings. And the numbers are the purest of
ephemera. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
*Today is his birthday
You need a fantasy baseball team. There is a near endless supply of stats, opportunity for historical analysis and prediction of future performance. Check out a Bill James historical abstract, Moneyball or baseball-almanac.com to whet your appetite. Just beware, these are deep waters that could drain time away from the blog. RC
ReplyDeleteBut are you beating Jay Coleman and Allen Lynch? Good old SAS in RTP has a statistical package that takes all the fun out of guessing for yourself(Dancecard.unf.edu). They have a 94% accuracy rate in predicting NCAA Tourney winners over the last 11 years.
ReplyDeleteBesides your temporary love of skateboarding, tetherball and drinking gallons of cheerwine, you were quite a stat hound as a 10 year old with particular interest in Boog Powell and Manny Mota...
ReplyDeleteaz