With “March Madness” in full swing, Luke Stanke, a graduate student in the Department of Educational Psychology, Quantitative Methods in Education track, suggests there may be a better way to select and seed teams for the NCAA Basketball Tournament.
Currently, a selection committee chooses teams based on a Rating Percentage Index (RPI) and other data. At the recent MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, March 2-3, in Boston, Stanke introduced a Win Index that ranks teams based on their regular season performance. Using eight years of data, he showed that the Win Index predicts outcomes of NCAA tournament games better than does the RPI Index or the selection committee’s seeding of teams. Results suggest that the new Win Index may better inform selection committee decisions than does the RPI Index.
For more, read the Star Tribune story on Stanke’s research or read his paper here.

See this WCCO-TV story: