A few days back, commenter igor eduardo kupfer compiled the log5 predictions for the first round, and tried to come up with a test of their validity. We didn’t agree on anything, but for the sake of intellectual honesty, here’s a breakdown of how those predictions fared, binned in 10% groups (so 0.5-0.6 collects those teams for which the winning probability was between 50-60%):
0.5-0.6: 2-2
0.6-0.7: 3-1
0.7-0.8: 4-1
0.8-0.9: 8-2
0.9-1.0: 9-0
(These records are approximate– it’s possible that I’ve misremembered a game here or there, but I’ve just come in from shovelling a foot of snow out of the driveway, and can’t be bothered to check.)
So, well, it looks about like you’d expect. The coin-toss games were a coin toss, and the slam-dunk games went as expected. Interestingly, the predictions were wrong about the few predicted upsets by seed (giving Arkansas a 55% chance to take down USC, and Georgia Tech a 70% chance of beating Duke), and the two real upsets that occurred (VCU over Duke, and Winthrop over Notre Dame) were given win probabilities over 80%.
What does this mean? Hell if I know. I’m just reporting.