USA Today Blog - March 15, 2007
No more fretting. No more over-analyzing that 8-9 game. Quit trying to figure out which 12 will be a 5. Just fill out that bracket. Here's a couple of things to remember. While it's nice to brag about pick that upset in the 12-5, 11-6, 13-4 games, those lower seeds rarely make it beyond the Sweet 16. The teams in the Sweet 16 and beyond are generally the higher seeded teams. So pick upsets carefully. You'll lose valuable points in your pool if you pick Albany to beat Virginia, and Virginia reaches the final eight. But if you're really procrastinating with your picks, three ISyE professors came up with a system called "Logistic Regression/Markov Chain Model for NCAA Basketball." The program is "designed to use only basic scoreboard data (which two teams played, whose court they played on, and (in the "pure" version) what the margin of victory was)." The model is based on the research of Russian mathematician Andrey Markov. Don't scoff. The professors bring results. In the past seven NCAA tournaments, 22 of the 28 Final Four teams were ranked first or second in their region by the LRMC system.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/bracketracket/