The site uses something called Elo Ratings to predict games. It writes, “They rely on relatively simple information — specifically, the final score, home court advantage, and the location of each game. (College basketball teams perform significantly worse when they travel a long distance to play a game.) They also account for a team’s conference — at the beginning of each season, a team’s Elo rating is regressed toward the mean of other schools in its conference — and whether the game was an NCAA tournament game.”
The FiveThirtyEight gives No. 7 seed UD a 52 percent chance of beating No. 10 Syracuse on Friday, an 11 percent chance of reaching the Sweet 16, a 5 percent chance of reaching the Elite Eight and a 2 percent chance of making the Final Four.
Kansas is the tournament favorite with a 19.1 percent chance of winning the title. North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan State, Oklahoma and Villanova are the only other teams with a better than 5 percent chance of winning.
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