International Business Times (New York City, March 12) -- March Madness kicks off this Sunday when the sages of the NCAA announce the lineups and seeds for the college basketball championship tournament. The science of March Madness brackets isn’t necessarily an arcane mess of equations. Sheldon Jacobson, a computer scientist at Illinois, thinks that you don’t even really need to comb through a team’s statistics and performance in the regular season to fill out your bracket. He prefers to look at the way the teams are seeded and thereby calculating their odds of advancing.
Related story: Bleacher Report (March 17) -- In a video feature, Professor Sheldon Jacobson, a statistician at the University of Illinois, uses 29 years of statistical bracket data to break down, analyze and predict the outcome of March Madness. In this first story, he talks about the Midwest Regional bracket. Jacobson also lent his insights to the West, South, and East regional matchups.
The State Journal-Register (Springfield, Ill., March 19) -- Sheldon Jacobson, a U. of I. professor of computer science, is a college basketball fan and has found a way to combine his love of sports and numbers. He developed a formula incorporating the past 29 years of the NCAA tournament to predict which seeds will advance. By taking the focus from teams, he aims to avoid the normal bias that get in the way of fans filling out brackets.