Tech in the Tourney: Brackets with Ease
The first day of March Madness has just about concluded, and although many of us are sitting back scratching our heads as to why we picked Vanderbilt over Northwestern or Princeton over Notre Dame, others are showing off their perfect brackets to the world. So who does this elite group of around 700,000 flawless people compose of? Well, I can assure you that it’s not filled with true college basketball fans who have followed their team the entire season. More than likely the person who is leading your bracket pool doesn’t even know anything about basketball, including the names of the schools they picked (you can probably guess how my girlfriend pronounces “Xavier”). This phenomenon isn’t new, but it is growing as technology continues to make its mark in the sports world.
ESPN’s March Madness game originated in 1997 when the website started to offer printable brackets for people to fill out with their friends. A few years later, they started to offer their users the option to fill out one of their brackets online and either print it out or view it online, but this never really caught on. Last year, the game was re-branded into “Tournament Challenge” early last year. This update was chalked full of technology and new features. This included filling out a bracket as before, but now you could join a group with your friends or family and it would keep track of the brackets and declare a winner without any work for you. This was what was thought to be the major reason that the record for total brackets on the platform was yet again broken, but this time by more than 2 million. These 13.3 million brackets were so easy to create and submit that on average each user had 3!
This year, there was even more growth. They ran a promotion this year, called March Madness Marathon, as it was the 20 year anniversary of the world’s favorite bracket game. At the peak period of entries this morning, fans registered 31,184 brackets per minute (520 brackets per second), an increase of 69 percent over last year. The total number exploded from 13.3 million all the way to 18.8 million. This was in part due to a new system that ESPN rolled out, allowing for single-click bracket creation. There were four different options that required just one click for the user to participate in a pool with their friends.
The first option is “chalk”, which is known in the sports world as picking the higher-seeded team. There are no algorithms running on ESPN’s servers when you select this option, as the seeds simply never change. If you’re lazy or just want the “best chance” (which won’t work out because Villanova won’t repeat), then this is for you. Your second option is “random” or coin flip, which is essentially picking one or two for each option. A sample winner under the random option could be Bucknell, Mount St. Marys or Northern Kentucky. This is another fun and simple option, but doesn’t give you that great of a chance to compete with your opponents.
The more interesting choices are with the third and fourth option. The third is “random weighted by seed”, which theoretically puts a certain weight on each seed and then simulates the outcome. For example, if (#10) Wichita State plays (#7) Dayton, there would be a 60–65% chance that Dayton wins, but they won’t win every time. This is essentially how we make our decisions on who we choose in our brackets. We know that the higher seed is better statistically, but we take into consideration the different factors that could cause upsets. Finally, the fourth is “random powered by BPI”. Otherwise known as “Basketball Power Index”, this is using trends and other analytics to rank teams in a different way than the actual seeding. This would probably be your most accurate way to complete an “easy bracket”, but it’s March Madness so you never know.
The technological enhancements that ESPN has made over the years has undoubtedly attracted millions of people to this great game and furthermore makes the tournament more interesting for everyone. I am excited to see how this year’s tournament will play out, but even more excited to see how ESPN plans to bring even more people to the tournament next year. The amount of money that this company is making off of our obsession with fantasy sports such as the tournament challenge, football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and even NASCAR (yes they have that) is absurd, but even more incredible is that the majority of these people have no idea what they’re doing. Bravo, ESPN.
