RPI Forecast Tournament Projections

I have started making the tournament field projections for next March. I know, I know, it is very early in the season to be able to say much about March, but as long as others are doing so, I figured I may as well too. Because my projections are purely objective, they should do quite a bit better than others early in the season, and maybe not quite as well as some very late when there is more likely to be some inside information about which teams will make the cut.


Here is the basic procedure:

1. Make end of season RPI Forecasts which entails:
   a. take completed games as given
   b. Use Jeff Sagarin's updated PREDICTOR to generate probabilities over future games
   c. Simulate 10,000 seasons based on random draws using the probabilities
   d. For each simulated season, calculate RPIs by conference, team, vs. 1-25, etc.
   e. Take averages to get an estimate of Expectations of the above



2. Using the "Dance Card Methodology" and the end-of-season projections from step 1, project the field (including automatic bids).

To be included in the Bracket Project Matrix, you need to take some sort of stance on seeding which is really quite subjective. Basically, I am not spending too much time on that aspect.

Last season, I kept track of the number of correct picks (for the field, not for the seeds) for many of the top sites including:

Basketball Predictions
Beat the Experts
Bracket Express
Bracket Project
Bracket Racket
Bracket WAG
Bracket Watch
Bracketography
Bracketology 101
Bracketology 3
Breaking Down the Bracket
Bryce's Bracket Predictions
Build a Bracket
CBS Sportsline
College Hoops Net
College RPI
Colton Index (JCI)
Crashing the Dance
DhankLily
ESPN Bracketology
FOX Sports
JCI
Jerry Palm
MAG
March Madness 07
Mr. Bracket
MRI Sports
NCAA Bracket Predictions
NCAA Hoops Digest
NetWire
PHSports

I calculated the number of teams that were correctly picked from the field over time, and compared it to the RPIForecast projections. Here are the results:

As you can see, the RPIForecast tournament projections did reasonably well compared to others. One thing to note is that I didn't start tracking others until early January, so there is really no telling what happend before then with the others.