Let the Madness begin.
The field for the annual NCAA men’s basketball tournament field was set yesterday on “Selection Sunday,” marking the start of what’s sure to be another exciting month of college hoops.
If you work at an office with fellow basketball fans or have at least a mild interest in the tournament, you’ll likely be spending the next few days filling out a bracket or two.
For those struggling to figure out which teams to pick, Bing wants to help. As this season’s NCAA’s “official bracket data partner,” Microsoft’s search engine is using its algorithms and analyzing 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes of the bracket to predict the most likely winners.
[Follow up: March Madness at Microsoft: How Bing is predicting college basketball game outcomes]
Bing’s algorithms have been reliable in recent memory, predicting this year’s Super Bowl champion — it picked the Patriots before the playoffs started — and 20 out of 24 Academy Award winners last month. Bing also has an impressive track record for picking World Cup match winners and the best singers on “The Voice.”
For its basketball-related predictions, Bing is crunching more than a decade of NCAA historical data to “identify key patterns over the years that contribute to a team’s success.” It is also using “social signals indicating the wisdom of the crowd.”
More specifically, USA Today notes that Microsoft is using a bevy of stats like win/loss ratio, distance from a team’s home campus to a given game, and data related to conference tournament play.
You can check out the NCAA predictions at Bing’s March Madness hub. The site is pretty slick, allowing users to hover over teams on the bracket to see data related to each matchup. There’s also a neat auto-fill function that lets you pick your own winners and then apply Bing’s technology for the remaining games you’re unsure of.
Unsurprisingly, Bing is predicting that the undefeated Kentucky Wildcats will win it all this year, defeating Duke in the final. Bing thinks that Kentucky, the No. 1 overall seed, has an 18 percent chance of winning the championship. It’s also picking Arizona and Villanova as the other two Final Four teams.
Below you’ll find Bing’s predictions for every matchup (click to enlarge). As far as its upset picks, Bing has Wichita State over Kansas in the second round of the Midwest bracket, Dayton over Oklahoma in the second round of the East bracket, and Eastern Washington over Georgetown in the first round of the South bracket. Take these data-fueled predictions with a grain of salt — the Madness almost always produces unexpected outcomes and Cinderella teams.
Bing’s March Madness homepage also offers access to highlights, scores, schedules, stats, and other related information. This is nice touch — as a regular March Madness follower, I like how Microsoft is using Bing to help create somewhat of a tournament portal for fans.
On that note, it’s fun watching companies geek out during March Madness. There are a handful of other data experts crunching the numbers to predict winners this year, including Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight team, which thinks Kentucky has a 41 percent chance of winning it all. I’m also looking forward to using Wall Street Journal’s Blindfold Bracket, a web tool that helps people remove biases from their selections. (Editor’s note: Looks like the WSJ unveiled something a bit different this year called “The Madness Machine“)
Also worth noting — Microsoft isn’t the only tech company rolling out products related to March Madness. Last week we noted how Snapchat was in talks with NCAA and Turner to show live action from this year’s tournament via its “Our Story” feature.
We’ll have more March Madness tech-related coverage over the next month, so stay tuned — and good luck with your picks.
