Congratulations to Dean Schmitz, who earned victory in the March Madness Geek Challenge thanks to Kentucky’s win over Kansas in the final. He used his superior average bracket score to best Dan Freve, who turned in the tournament's highest individual bracket.
Six of our seven entrants centered their choices primarily around tournament seed, while DMC employee Dan Freve chose to highlight a combination of Win-Loss percentage and strength of schedule. Both methods proved effective as Dan, Dean, and Alex Krejcie were all still in contention heading into the last weekend of the tournament. It came down to the championship game, and had Kansas prevailed, Alex would have catapulted to the top of the standings and been the winner. The final standings:
| |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
K |
Current
Best |
Current
Average |
Total |
| Dean Schmitz |
0.2 |
0.1 |
0.3 |
1 |
1.5 |
1360 |
988 |
2348 |
| Dan Freve |
3 |
5 |
0.5 |
-1 |
7 |
1370 |
889 |
2259 |
| Ken Brey |
-0.1 |
-0.1 |
0.2 |
1 |
0.35 |
1230 |
851 |
2081 |
| David Gosse |
1 |
2 |
0.2 |
4 |
8 |
1120 |
818 |
1938 |
| Kevin Ferrigno |
2 |
-1 |
0 |
4 |
12 |
1200 |
700 |
1900 |
| Alex Krejcie |
0.5 |
1 |
0.5 |
3 |
6 |
1120 |
775 |
1895 |
| Bruce Polson |
1 |
1 |
1 |
5 |
8 |
950 |
735 |
1685 |
One interesting note, about 35% of ESPN.com brackets picked Kentucky as the overall winner, while 17 of the 70 brackets (24%) created for the Geek Challenge picked Kentucky. It is no surprise that in a contest that encouraged some randomness to the results, that we picked the overall favorite less than the public at large. Six of seven entrants had Kentucky to win at least one of their 10 brackets. And the best 3 brackets would have finished somewhere in the top 90-95% of the over 6 million ESPN.com entries. This resulted in our brackets significantly underperforming the field as a whole, since picking the overall winner is so important to obtaining a high scoring bracket.
Picking higher seeds this year, including picking Kentucky to win as the overall number 1 seed, resulted in bracket score of 1200. Brackets over 1200 finished in the top 20%, and of the 70 brackets created for the Geek Challenge, 8 of them (11%) scored 1200 or better.
Stay tuned for Part II of the results where we will look at how much performance in the contest was based on skill vs. luck.
Please submit your comments to: geekchallenge@dmcinfo.com