In this issue we look at March Madness mathematically.

2. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
The 64 teams that play in the elimination rounds are divided into four
groups of 16 teams. The four groups represent the West, East, Midwest,
and South.

3. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
Within each group of 16 teams, each team is given a ranking. The #1 seed
is considered the best team in that group of 16.

4. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
In the first round of play, the #1 seed plays the #16 seed, the #2 seed
plays #15, and so on. A shortcut for remembering which teams play is to
note that the sum of the seed numbers equals 17.

5. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
For each group of 16 the brackets for the first and second rounds are
organized like this. The winners of the first round play in the second round
based on this arrangement of brackets.

6. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
This table is a summary of the number of wins in the first round for games
played from 2001 to 2011. Source: http://www.allbrackets.com.

7. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
This graph shows a summary of the first round results based on the data
table. Note how the top seeds show the most success. This isn’t surprising
since the highest seed plays the lowest seed.

8. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
After the second round of play, the winners go on to play the Regional
Semifinals, as shown in the brackets.

9. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
This table is a summary of the number of wins to advance to the Regional
Semifinals for games played from 2001 to 2011. Once again, note how the
top seeds dominate.

10. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
This is a graph of the data from the previous data table.

11. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
The succeeding brackets include the Regional Finals, the Final 4, and the
Championship game.

12. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
This table shows the succeeding rounds leading up to the Championship
game. With each succeeding round, the number of seeds drop, until the
Championship winner comes exclusively from the top three seeds.

13. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
As you can see, the #1 seed dominates in terms of championship wins.
And the top three seeds make up all the champions from 2000–2011.

14. NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament
• For the 2012 tournament, can we say,
based on previous statistics, that the
champion will likely come from one of the
top 3 seeds?
• What is your prediction?