News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
135 games played. It had never happened. Until Friday night, when your March bracket blew up.
A 16-seed defeated a 1-seed for the first time since the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. Maryland Baltimore County beat Virginia in the NCAA First Round.
It begs the question. Mathematically or statistically, should a #16 team have won before now? When you simply use math as a predictor, Tennessee Tech Associate Professor Of Mathematics Michael Allen said no.
“As nobody wins, then what you’re looking at is that the probability gets smaller and smaller,” Allen said. “By having the win now, then mathematically it looks like it takes 136 games before we finally have a winner.”
In essence, Allen said, the math of the problem picks up on the sports side of the problem. That is, a #1 seed should be a much better basketball team than a #16 seed. Just because an event takes place repeatedly, Allen said, does not increase the chances of a “win” happening.
Allen said it’s similar to the idea of a 1,000-year flood. Officials calculate the probability of a flood level reached once during the period. But Allen said, that does not mean you will only get one of those in a period.
“What could occur is that next year we have another 16-seed beat a 1-seed and that would change the numbers drastically,” Allen said.
A win by a 16-seed next year would add four more games and a second win to the data set.
“As we add data, we can change our predictions,” Allen said. “But based on what we have right now, it’s going to take another 30 years before we have this occur.”
