Currently no sort of formula determines which teams make the March Madness basketball tournament. Some criteria traditionally used are strength of schedule (specifically wins against high-ranking teams), higher regard for away wins than home wins, and of course, the team’s overall won-loss record. Statistics like these can help group teams based on certain criteria, but comparing each team is difficult, especially across conferences.
That means the probability a team has of making the tournament is not a classical probability based on a certain formula, but a subjective probability based on judgments of the selection committee.
With the football selection committee, I see many more challenges. First, you have a smaller sample size with which to judge the teams because there are only 12 football games in a regular college season, whereas there are approximately 30 games in a college basketball regular season and also the conference tournament. Second, with that many more games in college basketball, there are more opportunities to have comparable teams play one another. Because of the smaller sample size of games, and thus the disparity between teams’ schedules/foes, it is much more challenging to rank football teams than basketball teams.
I received my bachelor’s degree from Davidson College and watched intently the year that Stephen Curry led them to one 3-pointer from making Final Four. I don’t use any math when I pick my March Madness bracket, I go with my gut.
I have also followed college football all my life because I grew up a Georgia fan in Atlanta and now teach here at UGA. I don’t think there will be as much enthusiasm for picking games for the football playoff as we see with March Madness just because there are only four teams and only three games.
For March Madness, there are 2^63 or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 different ways to fill out your bracket. But with the football playoff, there are only 2^3 or eight different ways to pick the winners of the play-in games and the final champion. It’s fun spending time picking all 63 games in March Madness; it would take me all of 30 seconds to pick three football games.
If it got to a 16-team football playoff at some point in the future, then you would be talking about 2^15 or 32,768 possible combinations, which might lead to an atmosphere similar to what we see with March Madness.
