NP: The Gutter Twins, "Idle Hands"

Okay, so I didn't repeat as office NCAA pool champion, on account of Memphis' poor free-throw shooting. If I have some time, I'm still planning on running all the games and all the stats through some sort of regression to see if I can predict more of the games in hindsight. If this seems excessively nerdy, then you clearly don't know me very well.

I may also just try tweaking the algorithm I used to factor in free-throw shooting, but it's a bit trickier than it looks. Mostly this is because of something one of the announcers said during the final last night, and that's the notion that some players on Memphis were actually good free-throw shooters, statistically, but they hadn't had to make many under the pressure of, say, winning the NCAA championship. The quote from Billy Packer was something like "free throws are easier when you're up 20 points."

So, the trick would be to factor point differential in there, so that free-throw percentage wouldn't contribute as much for teams with a large point differential. Shouldn't be too hard, and I might find a way to just add free-throw percentage to the point differential component that I was already using.