Oh glory be that is basketball, the blessed NCAA tournament is again upon us. All over the land, the faithful will be filling out their brackets, science will be applied. And yes, once again, all over the land the faithful will be wrong.
Yup, it's true, there's a science to filling out a good bracket, a science to which many are unfamiliar. In truth, basketball has been a keen topic of research over the years, and some of that research applies to the field of 65.
In 1985, Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky did an analysis of the so called "hot hand" theory. This is the idea that shooters are streaky. Historically, both fans and players have made similar errors in this regard, believing that a player's chance of sinking a shot after making the previous one exceed the inverse.
They tested this case using the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76's and the free-throw percentages of the Boston Celtics and found no correlation between the outcomes of successive shots. In a controlled experiment using men and women from the Cornell University varsity squad they discovered that the outcome of previous shots tend to influence a player's prediction (the last one went in so the next one will) far more than actual performance (ooops, guess I was wrong about it going in).
So what's the correlation with the tournament? People love the Cinderella teams. Right now, there are a bunch of teams that rose to the top of the heap in an unexpected leap of glory. Take Mississippi State (MS). They were a bubble team (sitting on the bubble, most likely not headed to the big dance) until they somehow managed to win 6 in a row to win the SEC conference tournament, and earn themselves an automatic bid and a 13 seed.
In other words, they just made a whole heap of shots right in a row and there's a very strong tendency to assume they're going to keep making such shots. But, you say, they did just beat 6 tough teams and rose to the top of the SEC.
Uh-huh, sure they did, but does that mean they'll continue to make them come next week's tournament?
If you go by the stats, and by the ‘psychology of the hot-hand,' this is most likely not the case. Now, clearly, I'm stretching the logic here a bit. In this sort of analysis, successive basketball shots work a bit like flipping a coin, another area where we think past performance is indicative of future performance, despite the fact that the odds reset to zero every time we flip. Too many factors influence the outcome of a game for this kind of one-to-one correlation, so here's a bit of coaching philosophy to back it up further.
Yesterday, on air for ESPN, Coach Bob Knight spoke about what it takes psychologically to win the big dance, citing as the most important factor: be yourself.
Now this might seems like a bit of New Age theosophy creeping into sports psychology, but Knight's point is that teams who win are teams that don't have to change to win. "You can't just change your mental approach overnight," said Knight, "and play better now than you before."
Well, you can, as MS proved, but Knight's point is in tournament play, because of the ferocity of competition and the newness to the match-ups (teams who play each other in the early rounds of the tournament are usually teams that have not met during the year) this tends to fall apart. It's the hot hand idea extended to the hot team.
It gets screwy because, in this case, MS had history with the teams it beat to reach the conference championship. There was prior information there. Players know each other. There's conditional learning and episodic memory at work here—but come next week those thing go out the window.
Next week, the playing field levels. When that happens, as any great athlete will tell you, the only way to win is "play your game." This is a fancy way of saying ‘be yourself' which is also the reason why Cinderellas arise in the actual tournament, but rarely carry the magic from a conference championship into the tournament. Once you randomize the playing field, those streaks tend to expose themselves for what they are: streaks. Bits of random luck that add together and appear like real skill, but are really not.
Is this enough to help you win your office betting pool? Perhaps not. But it's certainly enough to help you do what so many won't be able to: get past the first few rounds.
Good luck, and may the Gods of Bracketology smile upon you.
