The NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket was announced yesterday, which has kicked off the usual round of people "predicting" the outcomes based on totally silly criteria like the Academic Progress Rate of the schools in question.
This is, of course, completely frivolous. What you really need is solid, relevant information. Like predictions based on the ranking of physics graduate programs:
(Click for a slightly larger image.)
The algorithm used to fill this in was simple:
- The school with the higher-ranked physics program wins
- Schools with no physics program ranking lose to schools with any ranking whatsoever
- In case of a tie (two schools with the same ranking, or two schools with no ranking), the higher seed wins.
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That's small and hard to read, but it's filled out with the winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school…
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Woot! Go Bears!
You're the only person I know with any Maryland connection, so I feel obligated to do some trash talking. And yet, an ACC team will probably take the Bears to the woodshed.
If you want though, I can teach you the California Drinking Song... got me through many a loss, it did.
Go Bears indeed!!
you know... this is not as ridiculous as I first thought. There seems to be a pretty strong correlation between physics program quality and basketball program quality. I guess more money is good for everything.
Cornell/Berkeley West quarterfinal ftw!
*semi-final
"There seems to be a pretty strong correlation between physics program quality and basketball program quality."
Correlation? Heck, it's probably entanglement.
There seems to be a pretty strong correlation between physics program quality and basketball program quality.
In a bracket where two double digit seeds (#10 Michigan and #12 Wisconsin) make the Elite Eight? And no seed higher than 5 (Illinois) makes the Final Four?
It would be a more interesting tournament than what will probably happen. Wisconsin over top seed Pittsburgh in the Sweet Sixteen would be something to talk about.
Of the only 16 private schools in the tournament...
8 are eliminated in the first round (Siena, Dayton, Robert Morris, BYU, Marquette, Villanova, Radford, Butler).
Wake Forest, Boston College, Cornell, Gonzaga, American, Duke, Xavier and Syracuse survive to the second round.
Only Cornell and Syracuse win two games. None win three games.
I'm not a physics person...the only surprise to me is that American beats Villanova.
Cornell would have been a real bracket buster if not for the misfortune of being pitted against Berkeley in the Sweet Sixteen.
If Stony Brook, UCSB, or Northwestern were in the tournament there would be more upsets.
I'm not a physics person...the only surprise to me is that American beats Villanova.
I was surprised by that, too. Villanova doesn't appear to have a grad program in physics (at least, they're not in the rankings), but American does. Go figure.
I did the same thing, except with rankings of graduate music programs. I have the same winner (or at least would if I didn't make a mistake on the ESPN site), but the rest of the final four are different, showing that research universities have different strengths.
By architecture programs, Cornell wins the tournament. Cornell, Syracuse, USC and Texas are the Final Four.