Can analytics help you win your NCAA tournament pool? Don't bet on it

Yardbarker (March 18) -- There is now apparently a cottage industry of mathematics professors who moonlight by toying around with NCAA Tournament analytics. Nnless you stumble onto brilliance, the way some dude named Brad Binder did a few years back when he picked every round of 64 game correctly, you're still essentially engaging in educated guesswork. And this, says University of Illinois computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson yet another member of the NCAA-tournament academia-industrial-complex -- is where analytics can make a difference. Jacobson runs a website called Bracketodds, which allows you to generate a computer-aided bracket for both the NCAA men's and women's tournaments based on the historical performance of the seeds. His formula also predicts upsets twice as often as picking at random would