Crunching the Numbers

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Crunching the Numbers

Your brackets are finalized, tip off has come and gone, and March Madness is fully underway. It has been a few trying weeks since any large sports competition has come our way -- unless you count the men's hockey finals in the 2010 Winter Olympics. So in terms of games that captured our interest and inflamed our passions, sports have been a little slow.


Is it any wonder that NCAA college basketball tournament prompts so many of us to fret over our brackets and remain glued to the television set during all of these games?

As with any competition, the unwritten ending is the lure. But what if what goes down on the court is more predictable than we think?

That's the premise put forth by Paul Bessire of PredictionMachine.com, a quantitative analysis generator and probability website. According to Bessire, known as a connoisseur in the game of odds, his site takes each match, puts it through every scenario 50,000 times to give a solid winning percentage, and will ultimately pick the winner.

How does he magically come up with these numbers? His “predictalator” is based on seasonal statistics, such as the current roster, strength of schedule, and paced-adjusted player numbers from the past 30 games.

Bessire believes that most people go with a gut feeling, and just guess. The reason for his site, he claims, is to provide a more predictable guess. The NCAA tournament is no different, with PredictionMachine.com generating the tournament tens of thousands of times to come up with the most likely situation to happen through educated conditions. Some calculated predictions for this year include (5) Temple with a 66.6% chance of taking down (12) Cornell in the first round, with Kansas marked at a 15.7% to win the whole thing.

Of course, all this knowledge doesn’t come for free. For $20 a day (or $100 for the Big Dance), you can access a fully predicted bracket, analysis and previews for upcoming sports. Don’t think it’s fair to charge? Bessire would argue differently, as he has correctly named the winner of the past 5 out of 6 SuperBowls, World Series, Stanley Cups, and NCAA tournaments.

In terms of marketing his site, Bessire has a leg-up on the competition with the latest technology. By launching it recently, he has tapped into the lull of the sports world and primed himself for a steady influx of site visitors and customers. Sports fans are almost dying for something like this to come around, and with the bracket selection rush that surrounds the tournament, he placed himself in the forefront of prediction sites. He also recently posted a MLB 2010 preview – in the form of free content – on the site, which will certainly generate more traffic in the coming months.

Of course, with technology increasing, there will surely be more sites like Bessire’s popping up, but that’s why they call it Madness, right?

-Mia SpadoniTweet