How much Smarter are College Basketball Experts than the Rest of Us?

April 13, 2014

I wrote an article this week for Deadspin looking at how much better college basketball “experts” did at predicting the NCAA tournament this year than non-experts. I used the same 11 million brackets from ESPN.com’s Tournament Challenge as I used for the earlier article in the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the experts didn’t do all that much better than the non-experts.

“Generally the experts’ brackets were slightly better than the non-expert ones, although the evidence isn’t especially overwhelming. The analysis suggests that next year you’ll have just as good a chance of winning your office pool if you make your own picks as if you follow the experts.”

I’ve also made the data available here.