More Probability Models for the NCAA Regional Basketball Tournaments

Abstract

Sports events and tournament competitions provide excellent opportunities for model building and using basic statistical methodology in an interesting way. In this article, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) regional basketball tournament data are used to develop simple linear regression and logistic regression models using seed position for predicting the probability of each of the 16 seeds winning the regional tournament. The accuracy of these models is assessed by comparing the empirical probabilities not only to the predicted probabilities of winning the regional tournament but also the predicted probabilities of each seed winning each contest.

Key Words:

• Basketball
• Logistic regression
• Regression.