At 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday night, after the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament selection committee unveils its choices and seedings, a separate group of 12 athletic directors and administrators will release brackets for women’s teams. If you love upsets, you probably don’t need us to tell you that it was the NCAA Women’s Tournament where a 16-seed won a game for the first time ever, when Harvard beat Stanford in 1998 in one of the greatest giant-killings in sports history. Sunday night will bring another whole slate of long shots to root for. And we have decided it’s time to bring our analytical methods for finding Cinderellas to the women’s game. We’ve been projecting upsets on the men’s side since 2006. And now we’re here to predict upsets on the women’s side.
Applying statistics to women’s tournament upsets has taken this long for two basic reasons: Few statistics and few upsets.
There’s a persistent gap in the breadth and depth of numbers available for men’s and women’s sports at almost all levels across nearly all sports. If you have anything to do with running a sport, one of the best and most cost-effective ways to grow it is to throw open the doors to its statistics and let professional researchers and armchair statheads alike build and…
