Since I did not correctly predict last year's Nobel Prize winners, my predictions for this year will look fairly similar to last year's.
1. Lars P. Hansen and/or Hal White. I had them first last year and it has been one additional year since the last econometrics selection.
2. Richard Thaler and/or Robert Schiller.
4. Gordon Tullock. Trendier choice than last year.
4. Paul Romer. I dropped him behind Tullock since Macro won last year.
The Cub Reporter used much of the off-season to describe the Cubs' off-season plan as "Project .500". The Cubs have decided to take that to extremes. After each of their ten even-numbered games they have had an even record. This is their sequence of games so far this season:
LWLWWLWLLWLWLWLWWLLW
This looks like the type of sequence someone would make up trying to make the sequence look random.
I noticed this pattern when the Cubs were 7-7, but I wasn't sure if it was that unusual. The fact that they are the first team to go 1-1, 2-2 on up to 10-10, makes this a little more interesting.
Actually maybe we should not view it as that surprising. Assuming that each game has a 50% chance of the Cubs winning and each game is independent, the likelihood of them doing this is 1 in 1024. There have been somewhere over 2300 individual-team baseball seasons, so we might have expected someone to do this. Of course most teams in history had either a greater than or less than 50% probability of winning each game, so that probably explains it.
As I did last year, I tried to come up with what my projection would be for the NCAA field if it was 96 teams instead of 68. One assumption I make is that they will take no losing teams. Last year this was a strong assumption, but this year it probably would not have made a difference. I will assume that all of the at-large NIT teams would have made it, plus Missouri St. Since there were 13 automatic bids for the NIT that still leaves eight additional spots to come up with. Wisconsin-Milwaukee was an automatic bid and a five-seed, while Harvard was an at-large and a six-seed. However, making Milwaukee a five-seed meant that they were playing Northwestern which means a lot less travel. I will thus not assume that they would have been selected (see below).
My final eight in order of selection:
Marshall: should be in
Maryland: should be in
Southern Miss: should be in
Minnesota: overall ok record but finished the year 1-9
College of Charleston: good RPI, good record and won regular season conference title
Hofstra: worse RPI than CAA-mate Drexel, but finished higher in conference
Wisconsin-Milwaukee: a UAB-type pick, regular season champion from a highly-rated conference (at least at the 96-team level). The high NIT seed is indicative of strong assessments of this team.
Baylor: Not a good record but from a big-time conference
Last 4 out: Central Florida, Drexel, Iona and Mississippi St.
Next 4 out: Valparaiso, JMU, Kent St. and Tulsa
I was preparing my annual 96-team tournament field. In trying to determine the last couple of teams, I kept coming back to the question of why the selection committee picked UAB. I think UAB had three things going for it:
In particular, the fact that it won the conference championship of Conference USA, which overall had a very good RPI, was very important to the team's selection. Also, the conference did not have any obvious other at-large teams to select. I think everyone has only focused on the high RPI, but I think the latter two elements actually mattered more and will be important to my analysis of an extended 96-team tournament.
Clemson and UAB play tonight in one of the First Four games of the tournament. As I said in my previous post, there has been a lot of whining about UAB's selection. However, there has been almost nothing said about Clemson's inclusion, even though when you look at their profiles they look very similar. UAB has the better RPI and the better record. They both beat one marginal tournament team (VCU for UAB, Florida St. for Clemson). Clemson beat 6 NIT or NIT-bubble teams, UAB beat 7. Clemson had more losses to good teams, but neither of them had any real bad losses. If you remove Clemson's three losses to UNC, they lost the same number of games and the profile of teams they lost to look amazingly similar. Heck, they both lost to Duke on the road.
It seems like the only reason to include Clemson is that they beat Virginia Tech and Virginia Tech beat Duke. Virginia Tech's win over Duke might be reason to include them in the tournament, but it seems like a bad reason to include Clemson.
Must be that Clemson plays in the ACC and UAB is in Conference USA.
