So I've been looking at some of the more "exotic" picking stuff- like the guy who CBS has on their page talking about upsets (Tiernan, I think). I've been seeing more and more of this type of analysis over the past 2 to 3 years- it's kindof a "pigeonholing" of upset types. If you're a 12, you'll upset a 5 one way but if you're an 11, you upset teams another way.
It's as if I could make a list and set up conditions like if you're an 11, you need to be good at playing on Thursdays and in the mountain time zone and have good guards but if you're a 12, you need to be in a city with a greater than 1 in 1000 per capita of sushi restaurants, play in a conference that starts with a letter in the first half of the alphabet, and have good strong forwards.
It just seems like a really flawed model in my mind and I'm starting to see a lot of these. The numbers and credentials are arbitrary and it's more like using hindsight to collect some only some select facts and predict the future and using only those. It's seems so counter to the stats that you see especially in baseball where a whole body of work is chosen and attempted to be quantified before trying to make a prediction.
Let me go dig up the link:
Bracket Science: The anatomy of an upset - NCAA Division I Mens Basketball - CBSSports.com News, Fantasy, Video I mean, I like some of the broad strokes the guy uses at first but then we start in on this silly pigeonholing. He has another article like that on CBS, but I don't have the link handy.
SI