It’s tournament time and that can only mean that sports fans all over the country are spending hours filling out brackets that will ultimately be no where close to accurate. As always, I am one such fan and have spent my afternoon calculating the probabilities for each team left in this years NCAA lacrosse tournament (I started before the Albany-Loyola game so naturally I had to make some adjustments as I went on).
I decided to use my previously posted total score rankings as the guideline for my probabilities. Go big or go home, right? I used my total score rankings to predict each teams win percentage against the other teams in the field. For simplicity, I ran each team in a very basic scenario where the highest ranked team’s would have progressed. Obviously, we all know that is not how sports work which is what makes these tournaments so fun for fans, but I didn’t have all day to run every possible simulation.
Below are my calculated probabilities for each team to reach the quarter finals, semi finals, finals, and become the 2014 NCAA champion. (For the record, I had Albany as only having a 30% of beating Loyola, so what do I know?)
| Team | Quarter | Semi | Final | Champ |
| Maryland | 66.5% | 40.4% | 16.7% | 12.3% |
| Albany | 100.0% | 65.4% | 27.1% | 11.2% |
| Denver | 54.2% | 38.3% | 22.7% | 11.1% |
| UNC | 45.8% | 30.8% | 16.9% | 7.6% |
| Duke | 61.3% | 31.9% | 13.0% | 5.2% |
| Bryant | 61.0% | 24.0% | 11.5% | 4.6% |
| Hopkins | 60.5% | 29.0% | 11.3% | 4.3% |
| Cornell | 33.5% | 14.7% | 6.1% | 2.1% |
| Air Force | 38.7% | 15.7% | 4.8% | 1.4% |
| ND | 50.9% | 17.6% | 4.8% | 1.3% |
| Drexel | 53.4% | 15.6% | 5.9% | 1.3% |
| Syracuse | 39.0% | 11.4% | 4.2% | 1.3% |
| UVA | 39.5% | 14.8% | 4.3% | 1.2% |
| Harvard | 49.1% | 16.6% | 4.4% | 1.2% |
| Penn | 46.6% | 12.4% | 4.3% | 1.1% |
Nelli Analytics 