Month/Year of Graduation

5-2022

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

Department

Mathematics

First Advisor

Andrew Swift

Abstract

Each year, millions upon millions of individuals fill out at least one if not hundreds of March Madness brackets. People test their luck every year, whether for fun, with friends or family, or to even win some money. Some people rely on their basketball knowledge whereas others know it is called March Madness for a reason and take a shot in the dark. Others have even tried using statistics to give them an edge. I intend to follow a similar approach, using statistics to my advantage. The end goal is to predict this year’s, 2022, March Madness bracket. To achieve the best possible results, I will use team and individual statistics to help form logistic regression models and formulate new statistics that have not been used or thought of before. Rather than jumping right into the 2021-2022 season, I look into past years’ statistics and tournaments to see how well my logistic regression models perform and see what differences if any, there are in variables used year to year. The 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 seasons will not be present (no tournament and no fans, respectively). After evaluating past years’ models, I make rules to provide the best possibility of upsets to occur, based on what was seen in the 2011-2019 tournaments.

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