Important links for stats nerds

I've been pushing tempo-free stats to anyone who will listen all season long, but if you want to win the Chronicle Sports Blog's Bracket Challenge, it never hurts to have some numbers on your side. Also, I can guarantee that you're tired of listening to ESPN's crew talk about "bounce-backability," "toughness" and "athleticism" by now, if you weren't already sick of it after the first 24 hours of coverage.

It's fun to see that most of the statistically-based approaches to projecting the NCAA Tournament install Duke as the favorite.  Of course, the NCAA Tournament is a probability-based affair. You'd look at me as if I were crazy if I suggested that the better team wins every game. But you'd also look at me as if I were crazy if I suggested that knowing the better team prior to the start of the game tells you nothing about the likelihood of predicting who is going to win that game.

To statistically project the NCAA Tournament, people who do this sort of thing use a quantitative ranking of NCAA teams, like the Pomeroy or Sagarin ratings. A computer that compares the rankings of two teams can determine the probability that one team will beat another. Then, using some sort of super-powerful wizard computer, the computer plays out the NCAA Tournament 5000 or one million times, compiles the results, and spits out the probability of each team entered into the tournament winning one, two, three, four, five and six games. For reasons that I don't really understand, this is called the log5 method.

So here's a compendium of tempo-free links to help you make your bracket picks:

• Someone wrote a program that uses Pomeroy ratings to essentially simulate the NCAA Tournament one time. There's a little slider so you can set the level of randomness anywhere from Dick Vitale's Chalk City to Bracket Busting Random. Warning: Clicking this link  will kill your productivity for several hours. [Bill Mill]
• A Duke grad student used Pomeroy ratings and the log5 method to determine the probability of every team in the field reaching each round of the tournament. [Immaculate Inning]
• Ditto from above, except its not a Duke grad student and he's using the Sagarin ratings instead of Pomeroy. [Wayne Winston]
• Finally, the great Ken Pomeroy himself has a log5, tempo-free preview of the entire South region, and other members of the Basketball Prospectus team have the East, West and Midwest covered. [South] [East] [West] [Midwest]