A Method to March Madness?

With the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournaments tipping off soon, brackets and bubble-busters is reaching a fever pitch. Two business professors and self-professed sports fanatics are trying to take some of the madness out of the month – and in the process provide insight into how technology solves critical business problems.

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Check out this video news release to learn more about SAS and the Dance Card.

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Allen Lynch
Associate Professor of Economics
Mercer University

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Jay Coleman
Professor, Operations Management and Quantitative Methods
University of North Florida

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Jay Coleman, an operations management professor at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, and Allen Lynch, an economics professor at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., will once again apply analytic software from SAS to predict "at-large" teams – those teams that did not get automatic bids to the Tournaments.

Over the past 14 years, their NCAA "Dance Card," powered by SAS^® software, has boasted an impressive 93% accuracy rate. Coleman and Lynch will be making this year’s final predictions on Selection Sunday, but you can see their current analysis, which is updated regularly, at Dancecard.unf.edu.

According to the professors, the accuracy of their Dance Card, and the factors and weights included in it, suggest that the tournament selection committees are fairly predictable in their decisions ... despite barbs from fans, teams and the media.

Predicting winners and upsets
Now, using another model powered by SAS, the Score Card, Coleman and Lynch are predicting tournament game winners. Over the last three years, the Score Card has correctly predicted the winner three-quarters of the time, including many upsets. In 2007, the Score Card achieved 81 percent accuracy overall and 84 percent accuracy in rounds 2 - 5.

More prediction, less description: basketball as a (business) metaphor
In addition to basketball picks, analytical software like that offered by SAS helps businesses succeed every day. Analytics help predict what will happen: which customers will respond to a bank’s direct mail on home equity loans, which floor plan will help a retailer sell more designer shoes, or which combination of medical treatments will keep a diabetic patient healthy and out of intensive care.

The "intelligence" that many other software vendors provide – basic reporting on what happened last year, last quarter or even last week – falls woefully short of the reliable, predictive intelligence that companies need to remain competitive.

"SAS can analyze a lot of information, pull out what’s important, ignore what’s not important and predict what’s coming in the future, as opposed to simply describing what happened in the past," says Coleman, who noted that the Dance Card represents an overall trend in business intelligence toward more prediction and less description.

"Predictive analytics is a key part of business intelligence that helps companies move from information to a decision, from the descriptive to the predictive," says Coleman. "With forecasting, data mining, optimization and other advanced predictive software from SAS, businesses can go beyond simply reporting on what has already happened and instead understand what will happen and where they need to go next."

Coleman and Lynch also found that their analysis was helpful in the classroom. "A model like this can be used in business to predict whether any event will take place or not," says Lynch, who uses the Dance Card as a teaching tool. "Right after showing my students this fun application of predictive analytics, I can show them six or seven business applications that use the same type of model."

College professors Jay Coleman (left) and Allen Lynch use SAS to predict which teams will be chosen for the "at-large" NCAA tournament berths and game winners.