Fake the Funk on a Nasty Dunk: Modelling the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

Because the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is a subject in which many young people are already interested, it provides an excellent opportunity to involve students in the creation, refinement, and testing of a scientific model. Many statistical features of the real tournament can be captured by a particularly simple model that can be understood by typical high school students or even advanced middle school students. Refining the model requires the use of Monte Carlo simulations, which can be easily performed by a (macros enabled) Excel spreadsheet. This model also provides an important illustration of the danger of taking scientific results out of their context; most people assume that the model that best represents the tournament will produce the best "bracket scores", but we show that this is not the case.