Happy April Fool’s Day, oh great and wonderful college sports fans. With no games yesterday, we had the opportunity to clean things up a little bit, you know, correcting any input issues over the hectic few weeks of Tournament basketball. We had the day off before the final six-day push. There are only seven more Women’s games, including our first Tournament Final today, and just 13 Men’s games including the tipoff of the College Basketball Crown (CBC) with its first games today.
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We start this final week with a GCR prediction record of 388-166 (.699) considering all games with the Men splitting out at 187-89 (.678) and the Women leading at 201-77 (.723). In the tables below, unseeded teams (like any team in the CBC or Women’s NIT, for example) are listed as “U” in the Seeds column. The Seeds and Conf columns are in the same order as the Games column, i.e., the first conference listed and the first seed listed matches to the first team listed. If there is only one conference listed, both teams are from that conference. The Pred column is the team that the GCR algorithm selected as the winner. That prediction is based on two GCR metrics (unshown in these tables, but working behind the scenes), Score and RPIF. If both metrics agree on the winner, we publish that prediction. If they disagree, we cannot predict and post “NPre”. In the Marshall/Arkansas St game, for example, the Score metric thinks Marshall will win by about 1 point while the RPIF has Arkansas St by about 2 1/2 points. When we predict a game so far this post season, we are close to 70% correct; however, when we list NPre, the Score metric is right about half the time and the RPIF is right about half the time. So far, we have not seen any correlation by, for example, point differentiation. In the MARS/ARST game, if we add the two metrics together, we would, theoretically, have Arkansas St by 1 1/2, but the data does not support that logic. So, while we would prefer to predict every game, in this type of instance, we would just be guessing.
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The Women’s Basketball Invitational Tournament (WBIT) has its final today featuring Columbia (one of the 4 seeds) and BYU (the overall 1 seed). The GCR is calling for the upset in this game. Go Lions! We also have our NIT Semifinals. After today, there will be just four games left (NIT Final, 2 NCAA Semis, NCAA Final). Here is today’s slate.
| Tour/ Round | Time | April 1st Women’s Games (All Times Eastern) | Conf | Seeds | Pred |
| WBIT/FINAL | 7:00 | Columbia (24-8/29) / BYU (26-11/60) | IVY/B12 | 4/1 | COLA |
| NIT/SF | 8:00 | Marshall (26-9/46) / Arkansas St (27-9/54) | SUN | U/U | NPre |
| NIT/SF | 8:00 | Illinois St (23-13/151) / South Dakota (26-9/66) | MVC/SUM | U/U | SDAK |
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The CBC is an 8-game tournament that makes its team selection after the NCAA and NIT brackets are set. There is a single 20-win team (Stanford), one .500 team (Baylor), and three teams under .500 (Minnesota, Rutgers, and Creighton). At least these eight teams get to spend a few days in Vegas. We have the first two of the First Round/Quarterfinals/Elite 8 of this tournament today. Here are the matchups.
| Tour/ Round | Time | April 1st Men’s Games (All Times Eastern) | Conf | Seeds | Pred |
| CBC/QF | 8:00 | Oklahoma (19-15/109) / Colorado (17-15/108) | SEC/B12 | U/U | COLO |
| CBC/QF | 10:30 | Baylor (16-16/117) / Minnesota (15-17/188) | B12/B10 | U/U | BAY |
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That’s it for today. Tune in tomorrow for our Men’s only episode as the Women have the day off. Thank you for reading and sharing with others, JoJo and G.
