Frequently Asked Questions
I can't find a bracket on your site. What's the deal?
The official principles and procedures for establishing the bracket lists three steps: selection of 34 at-large teams, seeding the teams (i.e., ranking them 1-65), and placing the teams in the bracket. The third step is essentially following a recipe after based on the results of the first two steps.
In other words, the hard part is selecting and seeding the teams. The final bracket doesn't reveal the exact 1-65 S-Curve because the committee has flexibility in placing teams in the bracket to create a balanced field. For example, a team that ends up on the #4 seed line (the 13th-16th overall slots in the bracket) could have been ranked anywhere from 9th (first on the #3 seed line) to 20th (last on the #5 seed line).
How does artificial intelligence help?
There is no formula for the selection and seeding process - all we have to go by is the final bracket from previous years. Artificial intelligence (especially machine learning) is good at attacking problems where there is a known input (the teams and their "nitty-gritty" data) and some output (the bracket) generated by some unknown or hidden process.
Of course, the committee is not completely data-driven (nor should they be), so this approach does not (and can not) consider everything the committee does. Since we don't completely know (media reports aside) all factors the committee uses and how they weight them, I follow the "best is the enemy of the better" maxim (thanks Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders): the approach is not perfect, but it provides useful and unique insight and is worth pursuing and improving.