A Method to the Madness?

With the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments tipping off soon, talk of 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.

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 16 years, their NCAA "Dance Card," powered by SAS® software, has boasted an impressive 93 percent accuracy rate. In fact, 2009’s final predictions were 94 percent accurate as Coleman and Lynch correctly predicted 32 of the 34 at-large teams. You can see their current analysis, 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.

Predictive analytics put to work
In addition to basketball picks, analytics software like that offered by SAS helps businesses succeed every day. Business 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.

"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 analytics toward more prediction and less description.

"This predictability is a key part of business analytics 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."

“We’re going to use basketball as a metaphor here.”
This is how Coleman begins his guest lecture in a Supply Chain Management class.  In this way, he explains that the Dance Card represents basketball – something fun and entertaining.  Just as SAS predictive software is used to forecast teams in the tournament, businesses use a forecasting model to improve supply chain management.

“If you have an idea of what your product demand will be from your end customer, you can manage supply chain more efficiently, with lower inventory levels, scheduling fewer deliveries and saving resources,” says Coleman.

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