Wall Street Journal: Statistics in Bracketology, March Madness and Statsketball
March 29, 2019
Statistics can be applied across many fields, including sports. If you’ve been following this year’s Men’s and Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournaments or our third annual Statsketball Tournament, you know that statistics can be applied to March Madness brackets to make well-educated picks.
Wall Street Journal’s “The Numbers” columnist, Jo Craven McGinty, highlighted the ways statistics can be applied to making predictions. She spoke with Dr. Gregory Matthews, who has been filling out brackets since he was eight. In recent years, Dr. Matthews has used statistics to make March Madness predictions:
“In 2014, he and a buddy won $15,000 in the bracket contest run by Kaggle, an online community of data scientists and machine learners owned by Google. Contestants estimated the probability of each team prevailing in every possible matchup.”
Statsketball is highlighted in the article as an opportunity for student mathematicians and statisticians to showcase their approach to picking the winning teams!
Read the full Wall Street Journal article here!
To stay up to date on Statsketball visit the contest page, and to be notified about next year’s Statsketball and other upcoming contests, join our email list.
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