THE POWER RANK

Free Giveaway: Special edition of March Madness book

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If you sign up for my free email newsletter between noon Eastern on Wednesday, March 8th, 2017 and noon Eastern on Thursday, March 9th, 2017, I’ll enter you in a drawing for one of 5 special edition copies of my book How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool.

Even if you don’t win, you still get my March Madness cheat sheet for filling out your bracket and my bracket advice.

To sign up, enter your best email and click on “Sign up now!”








You’ll get a confirmation email. You need to click on the link in the email to confirm your interest in the email newsletter and get entered in the give away contest.

No, I don’t care if you unsubscribe and then resubscribe to enter this contest.

Please check your email on Thursday afternoon, as I’ll email the winners for their physical mailing address. Books will go out that afternoon and arrive hopefully by Monday at the latest.

Good luck!

Podcast: How to Win Your 2017 NCAA Tournament Pool

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On this week’s episode, I discuss the research behind my book How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool. Topics include:

  • Can tournament games be predicted at all? You might be surprised how often one particular team wins, and why this matters in small pools.
  • How to pick the right pool. You might as well light your entry fee on fire if you enter the wrong pool.
  • The contrarian approach to winning a medium sized pool that will make sense to no one but you. This is the key to avoiding the luck of others in your pool.

Ryan Peters from Omaha, Nebraska joins me to discuss how he used my methods to win his pool.

Parts of the podcast come from the 2016 audiobook version of How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool.

To listen on iTunes, click here.

To listen here, click on the play button.

Finally!! Win probabilities for the 2017 NCAA tournament in February

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Are you ready for some March Madness? With the tournament only weeks away, it’s time to start handicapping the field.

Based on ESPN’s bracket projection, I calculated the win probability for each team through each round of the tournament. These calculations depend on my college basketball team rankings.

You can play with the results in this interactive visual.

Despite their loss to BYU, Gonzaga still had the largest win probability at almost 33%. No other team cracked 10%.

There are many things to like about Gonzaga. They’re ranked 5th and 1st in my offense and defense numbers respectively, which come from points per possession adjusted for strength of schedule.

However, they couldn’t crack the top 10 in either preseason poll, a surprisingly powerful predictor of tournament success. This isn’t one of Mark Few’s most talented teams, as it’s unlikely any player gets drafted in the first round of the NBA draft.

I like this Zags teams, but not at 33% to win this tournament.

How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool

You want to win your March Madness pool, right?

You’ve come across this site, The Power Rank. A very good start.

However, you can’t just fill out your bracket with the most probable team in every game. For some pools, you need to think contrarian.

To learn more, click here.

Podcast: Adam Stanco on the 2017 NCAA tournament

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The Football Analytics Show turns to college basketball for the next month, as Adam Stanco, producer at the Pac-12 Network and true hoops junkie, joins me to talk about the 2017 NCAA tournament. We discuss the following:

  • Adam’s five factors for teams that could win the tournament
  • The prime contender from the West coast with a surprising amount of NBA talent
  • The West coast team on which Adam disagrees with my numbers
  • The highly touted team that might win the tournament if they only had a true point guard
  • How Adam got his break in the sports world

To listen on iTunes, click here.

To listen here, click on the play button.

You can get more basketball content from Adam on his Great Point Podcast.