Watching the NCAA basketball tournament can be fun and exciting for sports enthusiasts and collegiate fans. But did you consider how exciting it can be for STEM enthusiasts as well? Sure having some knowledge of basketball and the current teams will be key in following along with the tournament and even making a bracket selection. But there is a ton of math-particularly statistics, and even some technology that makes this yearly event key. Knowing how much STEM plays a part in this yearly tournament might draw in both sports and STEM enthusiasts alike, providing an opportunity to get more kids excited about and engaged with STEM!
What is the NCAA Tournament and What is a Bracket?
The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament is a single-elimination tournament of 68 teams that compete in seven rounds for the national championship. The first NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament was in 1939 and was held every year (with the exception of 2020 where it was canceled due to the Coronavirus pandemic). The inaugural tournament in 1939 had just eight teams competing.
Filling out a bracket for this tournament refers to the process of selecting which teams will win each of the seven rounds and continue on for the chance to be the tournament champion by the final round where the top two teams will face off. According to this NCAA article, millions of people fill out a bracket every year, yet no one has ever filled out a perfect bracket. Could this be because the odds of filling out a perfect bracket (correctly selecting every team that will win every single game) are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9.2 quintillion)?! This number is assuming that the selection of each team is made based on nothing more than an arbitrary 50/50 coin toss. Of course, having knowledge of the teams, the skills of the sport, and the nuances of the league and the tournament can help make selections that are more likely to occur, so much of which involves math and even technology. Let’s take a deeper dive.
Finding STEM Throughout the Tournament
First, let’s understand how with each round of the tournament that gets added on (to accommodate for more teams), the odds of getting a perfect bracket selection drops dramatically. Starting with just four teams in the tournament yields only eight possibilities, yet doubling the participation to eight teams yields 125 possibilities. This is a great opportunity to learn about and understand exponents in math! The number of possible tournament results is found by taking the number of teams playing in each game (always 2 in this case) to the power of how many total games will be played. A total of four teams in the tournament would yield a total of three games-two each in the first round and one in the second, therefore, 2^3 = 8. A total of eight teams in the tournament would yield a total of seven games-four each in the first round, two each in the second round, and one in the third, therefore 2^7 = 128. What a jump!
Next, it helps to know that the teams are ranked and matched-up in the first round to give the higher-ranking teams a more likely chance to win those rounds by having them play lower ranked teams. The entire tournament is broken up into four quadrants, each producing a number 1-16 seeded team. Knowing which team is ranked where can certainly help understanding the likelihood of making a correct winning selection. It would seem more likely that higher ranking teams would have a better chance of winning against lower ranking teams compared to teams who face off that are more equally matched. But of course, with everything in this world, there is always uncertainty. In 2011, neither a number one nor number two seeded team made it to the final four teams to play (which represents one team from each of the four quadrants). Understanding what factors go into making the seed assignments, statistics, and other factors can help with this selection process. Check out this article from Smithsonian where applied mathematics and computer science professor at Davidson College, Tim Chartier, is interviewed. Every year he leads a group of students who test various mathematics methods in picking out teams-lucky students!
Additionally, knowing which match-ups are likely to produce an upset could be key! In this article from Tech Republic, Kevin Brennan, AP and graduate statistics educational expert on the Varsity Tutors platform, offers his insights on selecting probable winners using both math and even technology. He sites the number 7 vs 10 seed as an example of a match-up that is difficult to predict and offers a visual decision tree, along with a series of equations, to explain how he makes those selections each year. Additionally, Brennan continued to explain how advances in technology have helped fuel the potential and excitement of making selections in this tournament.
‘ “Over the past decade, technology has significantly modernized basketball and helped with sports predictions,” ‘ Brennan stated in this interview, reported in the article. ‘ “Many aspects of our lives are becoming more data-driven, and sports analytics is a huge part of this. Basketball has been progressive with technology, including individual player and ball-tracking technologies, incorporating historical metrics of shooting efficiency and passing accuracy for viewers to have the most information to make logical predictions, especially with compiling March Madness brackets. New metrics like player efficiency ratings help players, coaches, and fans better understand the game.” ‘
The interview continues with examples of companies that are a part of this uptick in data analysis tools such as Google and Adobe.
Math and Statistics in STEM Careers
Leveraging something fun and relevant like the NCAA tournament is a great way to show kids how relevant STEM areas are in our lives. Even if the tournament is underway, consider how you and your students can follow along and make your own predictions using some of the ways discussed in the articles above. The tournament typically ends in early April, which also happens to be National Math and Statics Awareness month. Students can gain appreciation for the big role that math and statistics play in our world in areas such as internet security, climate change, disease, and more.
Want to encourage further learning in these areas? Check out this TryEngineering article on careers as a data scientist, which is often a big part of being a computer engineer. Also, this TryEngineering lesson plan can help introduce students to the concepts of data sorting and algorithms within computer science.