Friday, March 6, 2009

What are normal opponents wins in a given bracket?

I decided to look at several big, well-run tournaments from this year and last year. I chose big tournaments because there's less of a chance that odd results were created by restrictions given small brackets with too many teams from the same schools. I'm not going to include the tournaments' names -- this is just data. Here are the results for teams that broke:
That means at one tournament, the 6-0 with the hardest schedule faced opponents accumulating 25 wins, while at the same tournament, the 6-0 with the easiest schedule faced opponents accumulating only 22 wins. For the most part, the 6-0s at all these tournaments had reasonably narrow ranges (meaning that all the 6-0s had roughly similar strengths of schedule) except at two tournaments: the 16-25 and 19-24 are unusually broad ranges. A result of 25 opponent wins averages out to a little better than a 4-2 record/opponent; 16 OW averages out to worse than a 3-3 record! The spread for 5-1s, however, looks consistently larger, from better than a 4-2 record/opponent average down to a worse than a 3-3 record/opponent average.

The results are even more surprising when looking at seven round divisions:
The 7-0s' ranges look reasonably small, but the 6-1s and 5-2s faced very different schedules of opponents! At one tournament, the luckiest 5-2 faced opponents racking up only 21 wins (an average of a 3-4 record), while another 5-2 faced opponents racking up a whopping 36 wins (an average of better than 5-2) -- a harder schedule than the best 7-0 faced!

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