GT professors master NCAA bracketology

Filling out your NCAA bracket at the last minute?

Three Georgia Tech professors have it all figured out — or at least they hope so.

They predict that North Carolina, Memphis, Pittsburgh and Louisville will make the Final Four, with the Tar Heels beating the Tigers in the championship game.

Tech professors Joel Sokol, Paul Kvam and George Nemhauser, sports fans and members of Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering department, have devised a mathematical model to predict basketball winners. Over the past nine years, Sokol said, it has been better at predicting outcomes than other popular mathematical rankings models, as well as the polls.

It rewards teams for wins over strong opponents, and credits them even further for wins by a large margin and for wins on the road. Overtime games are treated like ties.

Their logic was that a team that wins by one point isn’t that much better than the team it beat.

It’s called the Logistic Regression/Markov Chain, or LRMC.

Andrey Markov was an all-American point guard for Rutgers in the early 70’s. (Just kidding. He was a Russian mathematician. But you knew that.)

Sokol said that, in terms of predicting the NCAA tournament, it has largely outperformed other mathematical models, such as the RPI, Sagarin and Massey rankings, as well as the writers and coaches polls. The NCAA selection committee uses a modified version of the LRMC in arranging the tournament field.

Over the past nine years, 30 of the 36 Final Four teams were one of the two highest-rated teams by the LRMC in their respective regions. Sokol concedes it might not sound like much, but said that other rankings models picked between 21 to 24 Final Four teams over the same span.

Last year was the LRMC’s one shining moment. It picked all of the Final Four teams, the championship matchup and the winner (Kansas).

“Actually, there’s a guy who sent us an e-mail last year who said he knows nothing about the NCAA tournament or college basketball, he just blindly followed our picks,” Sokol said. “He won, so he said he’d like to make a contribution to our favorite charity, so that was really nice.”

The LRMC also calls for two 5-12 upsets, Wisconsin over Florida State and Arizona over Utah, as well as No. 10 Southern California to knock out No. 7 Boston College and then No. 2 seed Michigan State in the second round.

Fans can check out the rankings at www.finalfour.gatech.edu