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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

March Madness at Its Finest

I'm sitting here at at 2:30 in the morning and I'm still contemplating my picks I made for my bracket.  I find it very addicting.  I'm not the most knowledgable person in dealing with college basketball so I've been listening to some experts and seeking out information online.  The most interesting aspect: it probably doesn't even matter.  It's so hard to choose these things, and I feel like there's a lot of guessing involved.  For one thing, at the end of the season, none of the top four ranked teams in the nation going into their end of the year conference tournaments won them.  It may not be a huge deal, considering a team like Kentucky, who lost their conference tournament, is being selected by over half of the nation to make the final four.

While looking for some hints and pointers, I stumbled across this article on a blog.  If you scroll down, the part I find interesting is the networking section (granted it's from 2006).  It's a network of all the teams that played each other throughout the season that made the tournament.  After reading this, I decided to search for a more relevant network to see what it might look like.  I found this.

Poor South Dakota State.....

To better understand the network, if an arrow is pointed at a team, that means that they were beaten by the team from which the arrow originates.  The nodes are color coded by conference.  Also, the size of the nodes are based on the seed that the team received for the tournament.  The better the seed, the larger the node.  I just thought this was pretty interesting and relevant to what we have recently covered in class.  It's a cool way to think about college basketball and the madness that ensues in March.  Here is the full article to the picture above.

Best of luck to everyone!

1 comment:

  1. I wonder how this was supposed to translate to Duke and Missouri losing in the first round. This is a historical tournament in a bad way, but it just goes to show you, even though South Dakota state didn't beat Baylor in the first round, other team who were very small nodes on the network, seemingly had no issues whatsoever in taking down some of the largest hubs in the network in emphatic and historical fashion

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