The first weekend of March Madness 2016 is in the books and there were plenty of upsets that not many experts or computer programs predicted.
That includes Microsoft Bing, which finished 21-11 with its data-driven first round projections.
That was actually worse than the “National Bracket” on ESPN, which calculates the most popular picks from each of the 13 million brackets submitted to its Tournament Challenge. Based on those picks, the “National Bracket” — which was identical to Yahoo’s “Popular Picks” bracket — finished 23-9 over the first two days.
FiveThirtyEight, the prediction site led by Nate Silver, did even better, finishing 24-8 through the first round of games.
With the updated bracket heading into the second round on Saturday and Sunday, Bing went 12-4 with its projections for the 16 weekend games. FiveThirtyEight also updated its picks and finished with the same 12-4 record.
Bing’s original bracket still has eight of the Sweet 16 teams, and three Final Four teams remaining. ESPN’s “National Bracket” has ten Sweet 16 teams, and three Final Four teams remaining.
A Bing spokesperson noted that Bing is still “above average amongst ESPN brackets” after the first two rounds.
Still, Bing isn’t doing all that great thus far, and even worse than last year when it missed 9 of the 32 first round games — compared to 11 this year — and missed seven of the Sweet 16 teams, compared to eight this year.
Bing crunches more than a decade of NCAA historical data to identify patterns that contribute to a team’s success. It also sorts through specific data from each game this season —win/loss ratio, distance from a team’s home campus to a given game, data related to conference tournament play, etc. — and uses “social signals indicating the wisdom of the crowd.”
The biggest takeaway from Bing’s mediocre performance so far? Even with all the historical data and algorithms, it’s still really, really hard to predict March Madness games — especially when stuff like this happens. That challenge is perhaps what makes the tournament so fun year after year.
In case you missed it, here were the top moments from the weekend:
KOENIG SENDS WISCONSIN TO THE #SWEET16!!!! https://t.co/6MnfXu2T0D
— NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) March 21, 2016
Miss Texas A&M's historic comeback? Here it is. (Still hard to believe it. Despite seeing it. Again.) https://t.co/vQnoZhlumX h/t @Deadspin
— Trenni Kusnierek (@trenni) March 21, 2016
