Davidson College student, Jane Gribble, was our March Mathness winner this year. Below she explains how she filled in her bracket.

I love basketball – Davidson College basketball. As a Davidson College cheerleader I have an enormous amount of school pride, especially when it comes to our basketball team. However, outside of Davidson College I know little to nothing about college basketball. I knew that UNC Chapel Hill was having a tough season because this is my sister’s alma mater. Also, I knew that New Mexico, Gonzaga, Duke, and Montana were all likely teams for the NCAA tournament because we had played these non-conference teams during our season and these were the most talked about non-conference games around campus. My name is Jane Gribble. I am a junior mathematics major and this is the first year I completed a bracket.

In Dr. Tim Chartier’s MAT 210 – Mathematical Modeling course we discussed sports ranking using the Colley method and the Massey method. We were given the opportunity to apply our new knowledge of sports ranking in the NCAA Tournament Challenge. Since Davidson College was participating in the tournament my focus was on one game, the Davidson/Marquette game in Lexington, KY. When we traveled to KY I thought I had missed my opportunity to fill out a bracket, but one of my classmates was also traveling for the game with the Davidson College Pep Band and had the modeling program on his computer. We completed our brackets in the hotel lobby in Kentucky the night before our game.

My bracket used the Massey method because in previous years it has had better success than the Colley method. I decided to submit only one bracket, a bracket solely based on math (partially because I know little about college basketball). As a cheerleader and a prideful student it upset me to have Davidson losing against Marquette the following night, but I wasn’t going to let a math model crush my personal dreams of success in the tournament.  The home games were weighted as .5 (it would have been 1 if it was an unweighted model) to take into account home court advantage. Similarly, away games were weighted as 1.5 and neutral games as 1. Also, the season was segmented into 6 equal sections. I believe games at the end of the season are more important than games at the beginning of the season because teams change throughout the year and the last games give the best perspective of the teams going into the tournament. There was no real reason for the numbers chosen, other than they increased each segment. The 6 equal sections were weighted: .4, .6, .8, 1, 1.5, and 2. With these weights in the Massey method my model correctly predicted the Minnesota upset, but missed the Ole Miss, LaSalle, Harvard, and Florida Gulf upsets.

After Davidson’s tragic loss I could not watch anymore basketball for a while. I even forgot that my bracket was in the competition. I only started paying attention to the brackets when a friend in the same competition congratulated me on being second going into the Elite 8; my math based bracket was in the top 10 percent of all the brackets. Once he told me my bracket had a chance of winning, I paid attention to the rest of the games to see how my bracket was doing in the competition. After Davidson’s loss against Louisville last year in the tournament I never wanted to cheer for Louisville. To my surprise, I went into the final game this year cheering for Louisville because my model had Louisville winning it all. I was not cheering for Louisville because of any connections with the team, but was cheering to receive a free ice cream cone, a prize that our local Ben and Jerry’s donates to the winner of  Dr. Chartier’s class pool.

Next year I hope to compete in the NCAA tournament challenge again. This year I greatly enjoyed the experience and want to continuing submitting brackets for the tournament. Next year I will submit one bracket that uses the exact weightings of my bracket this year to see how it compares from year to year. This year I wanted to submit a math bracket that looked at teams who had injuries throughout the season. My motivation for this was Davidson’s player Clint Mann. Clint had to sit out many games towards the end of the season because of a concussion, but he had recovered in time for the NCAA tournament. I thought that our wins during the time without Clint showed our strengths as a team. Unfortunately this year I ran out of time to code this additional weighting. Hopefully next year my submissions will include a bracket using the weights from this year, a bracket that includes weights for teams with injured team members, and another bracket with varying weights.