Day 1: Early Lines

So the early lines are up (on Bodog and, well, everywhere else) for Thursday's first-round NCAA action. The first round is, supposedly, the greatest gambling day of the year, because public money pushes the lines in all sorts of awkward directions, and reputation means more than results to a large swath of the population. Taking a look at the lines, there are a few that stand out:

[8]UNLV (-1) v. [9]Northern Iowa
It looks like the wrong team is favored here, with both Massey and KenPom giving UNI anywhere from a 1 to 1.5-pt edge. Of course, 2 points isn't a brutal edge, but when it flips the line, we pay more attention. Of course, depending on the money line, that might be the stronger play.

[6]Tennessee (-3) v. [11]SDSU
Both Massey and KenPom list this as closer to a 1.5-pt game . . . that other UT is a little overrated this year, and their "run-and-gun" style has been crippled by the 2nd Amendment (they're about average in pace) ... instead, they've done it with defensive efficiency, crushing 3P% for other teams. Unfortunately, SDSU is not a 3-oriented team (200th in 3PA/FGA), and SDSU crushes the offensive glass with a strong inside game that UT isn't tall enough to counteract. Could be a good matchup.

[4]Vanderbilt (-3) v. [13]Murray State
Massey has this at 3, while KenPom has it at 5.5+, giving some protection here. Vandy is likely overseeded a little, but Ogilvy in the middle may have a field day against Murray State.

[7]BYU (-5) v. [10] Florida
There are some that feel Florida is the worst at-large admitted to the field this year, and both Massey and KenPom think the true line is closer to 7. Good enough for me, even if BYU is, well, BYU.

[7]Richmond (-2) v. [10]Saint Mary's
Again, the wrong team is favored - Massey and KenPom have StM's as between a 1.5 and 3-point favorite. The Spiders have talent, there's no doubt, and this one might not pass the smell test based on matchups - Richmond is a bad O-reb team, a true "one-shot" offense that plays with pace and doesn't turn the ball over, while StM's is pretty bad at forcing turnovers. However, StM's can shoot the lights out, and if flying across the country doesn't slow it down, watch out.

And some quick hits:
-The numbers don't love Kentucky - that (-20) might be a little high, may be value in ETSU.
-Montana isn't particularly good, but nothing indicates that NMU should be a (-9) favorite in that game. May be a good place to pound the dog.
-It's not cut-and-dried, but it looks like KSU might clear the (-16) over UNT with some ease.
-Nobody has any clue what to do with the ND/ODU game. In fact, half the capping sites have ODU as a true favorite and the other half think (-3) is perfectly right. Unreal game really.

Loose Women, Hard Lemonade and Awkward Bank Shots

It's so close, you can smell it - that smell that will linger on you (and JC's basement) for a few days afterward, one that you don't even notice anymore because now, well, that's just how the world smells. And it smells good. Kind of.

We're three short days away from the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament, where 64 teams will bludgeon each other over and over until one winner appears, ready to cut down the nets about 7 weeks after the tourney starts. Since it is an orgiastic day of basketball, gambling, and drinking, we've spent years (YEARS JERRY) perfecting how to best mix these three things together while still retaining jobs, families, and without driving anything anywhere at all. We've got it down to a science. A fat, hairy, awesome science. Here's from 07, and from 08, and from 09, although . . . I mean . . . I lived it, sister. I just don't remember any of it.

The gamboooling is clearly the most important part, however - and so I'll run down a little about my system for determining "fair" lines, which I'll use to coast to an even-money finish, losing again to Brent, who will brush his teeth before bed every night even though he passed out for hours in the afternoon.

The 'key' to the whole deal is what is known as the "log5" method of determining comparative win probability. That sounds complex, but it's not - basically, if one team is a .600 team and the other is a .550 team, we want to know how often the .600 team would win if they played a thousand times (hint: It's not .575). The formula is:

(A-A*B) / (A+B+2*A*B)

So in our example, the .600 team would be expected to win 55.1% of the time. We can then convert this to a money line/point spread - the 'real' line would be between 1.5 and 2.5 points (depending on your conversion method). Easy - and you can even do it in Excel after drinking all morning. Trust me, this is vital to any projection system.

The play-in game gives us a chance to test it out. Winthrop is a 4-point favorite over Arkansas-Pine Bluff, and when we look at the weighted "true" values for each team, it looks like our "true" spread should be anywhere from 2.8 to 3.5. Massey (www.mratings.com) puts his guess at 3.7 in the same direction, so we know we're in the ballpark as the big boys here.

Looking at some other factors (courtesy of www.kenpom.com - one of the greatest sites in the f-ing universe), Pine Bluff plays a moderately-paced game based around a solid defense and pretty frigging awful offense, while Winthrop . . . does exactly the same thing. In fact, their numbers are nearly identical - you would sleep with one and not realize it wasn't the other, at least until it rolled over and gave off the MangleFace Vibe. I don't know where I'm going with this, but the teams are remarkably similar. As a result, we have no need to shift our profile at all, so we can say we lean juuuuust a little toward taking the points and riding "The Harvard of Pine Bluff" as hard as possible (NOTE: in this analogy, Shooter's Bronco-Bustin' NASCAR Bar is the Yale of Pine Bluff, and the local Valero is Brown). Also note: don't bet this game, it's really too close to take any edge.

Lessons in Probability and Randomness (Courtesy of the Memphis Tigers)

Everyone knows that causation does not equal correlation - you didn't even have to get a B in Statistics for Engineers like yours truly to understand and utilize this particular truth (to be fair, it was a two-credit class that was easy like Emerson sororities, and I'm pretty sure I actually skipped class during a test). I deal with correlative stats on a daily basis, though, and even I learned an important lesson while participating in perfectly legal NCAA pools this year: know the difference between "indicative" and "predictive" and how to apply correlations to sports wagering.

I found myself in an interesting quandary while filling out my brackets for this season's NCAA tournament - in every one, no matter how I did the analysis (and I did them in a variety of ways, from using basic stats to using advanced metrics to using who has the hottest cheerleaders), everything pointed toward one conclusion: the four #1 seeds in the Final Four.

This was a problem, because everyone knows that the four #1 seeds have never been in the Final Four prior to this year. Because it is such common knowledge, it's become a mantra at this point (just like picking a 12-seed over a 5 in the first round) - you never take the four #1 seeds into the Final Four, because it's never happened before. I know this happens because, even though I am basically a rational, stats-minded, in-depth gambler, I intentionally changed my bracket picks to exclude a #1 seed in this tournament (generally Texas over Memphis, although in one bracket I tried to expose a perceived inefficiency by taking Louisville over UNC - puke).

I'm not being results-oriented in claiming this was Corky Thatcher-level retarded, although that may be what it seems at this point - there is simply no viable reason for excluding the possibility of all four #1 seeds in the Final Four. Let's go through the perception, and see the issues.

First, there is really no way to support any assertions that the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee shows any real inefficiencies in selecting the field, or more specifically the top 4 teams to become the #1 seeds in any given tournament. At every point in the tournament, the lower seed shows a higher winning percentage over lower seeds, from the first round on - all data shows that the selection committee, as a whole, gets it right.

But wouldn't that mean it would be incredibly unlikely to go this long without all four #1 seeds reaching the Final Four? To be blunt, no - it's not that unlikely, really. Given the modern 6-round structure of the tournament, even if a given #1 seed were a 3:1 favorite over every team it played (which seems like a fairly impossible situation), that team would only have a 23.7% chance to reach the Final Four - or approximately 1:4 chance. The variance is huge in a single-elimination structure.

That's really what the problem becomes, then - the fact that the Final Four had not been comprised of solely #1 seeds in the past should not be used as predictive - rather, it is simply indicative of the high variance involved in the tournament itself. This means you should recognize that even the better team will often lose over the course of a given six-game, high-pressure stretch, and that the tournament only gives the best team over that stretch, not over the course of the season. This is not an obtuse lesson, by the way - you can actually guide your selections using this information.

For example, Louisville was underrated by most predictions and most analysis systems because Padgett was hurt for approximately the first third of the season - Loiusville's true talent level was closer to their stats over the last half of the season, which showed them to be closer to the level of Texas than that of Pitt or Xavier. Wisconsin was underrated by most - their pace numbers and stifling defense play a low-variance game, one that is a.) well suited to tournament play and b.) subject to being derailed by a hot-shooting team. Wisconsin's matchup against Davidson was thusly terrible, while they should likely have been picked over Georgetown - that's the kind of brief analysis that can lead to much better tourney results.

At the end of the day, I shaped my Final Four picks around some flawed assumptions - namely, that I "had to" leave a #1 seed out, even when everything told me that Memphis was simply the best team in that bracket, and that they matched up well with both Texas and Stanford. Had I not, I would be in slightly better shape in my pools.

However, all is not lost - if Kansas wins, I win two pools outright (one a winner-take-all pool of the degenerates from the big opening-weekend bacchanalia) and finish either first or second in the last pool, with first place coming if the final is KU over UCLA. Why the reliance on Kansas? Well, according to some stats, KU was the best team in the nation and had the highest probability of winning each of its six games (thus, the highest EV) . . . according to others, this was not the best pick. UNC was going to benefit too much from its status as the #1 overall team in the nation, as they become a "trendy" pick among people scared of screwing up their pools and losing to people who "know more" (these fears are primarily unfounded, by the way), so I felt like there just wasn't the value in picking UNC that KU carried.

It turns out I was right - of the biggest/highest-payout pools I'm in, I'm the highest ranked player picking KU in all of them, and the champion-heavy scoring used by CBS and Yahoo! means that I'll win, even from 5th or 7th place, should KU pull it out. Now, this is definitely a flaw, but one I'm more than happy to exploit. However, I would have put a little more space between me and them had I stuck to both my gut and the stats, and stayed on with all four #1 seeds. Lesson learned.

Celtics trade

Garnett to the Celtics in a deal including Al Jefferson? Danny Ainge, say it ain't so.

https://vpn.uconn.edu/nba/news/,DanaInfo=sports.espn.go.com+story?id=2954127

Edited to add: Ok, Bill Simmons brought up a good point, that the Celts basically were able to wait out a higher price, in that they reportedly offered Jefferson and the #5 pick earlier this summer, and were turned down at the time. I'm still a bit skeptical on how the team will do with no other supporting cast, but it should be interesting at the very least.