Predictive Formula says NC State 2nd most likely to pull off upset in Round 1

I’m going to give it to you straight, this is about as unique and in-depth a formula as I’ve ever seen from FiveThirtyEight. If you aren’t aware, FiveThirtyEight is an ESPN owned sports and politics driven analytics site. It’s basically a home base for number junkies.

Yesterday, they posted an article, showcasing a formula they’ve been using to project upsets, but it’s not your typical algorithm. It was actually inspired by results from image recognition. If you want the dirty details of how it calculates this stuff, then just give it a read, but basically, they say it is trained to find upsets using team-to-team similarities instead of raw statistics such as offensive rebounds or turnover rates.

The take away for you the NC State fan is the Wolfpack scored out as the 2nd most likely team to pull off an upset in round 1.

They call this the Localized Upset Classification model (LUC, pronounced “Luke”) and here is their blurb on how it has performed over the past 4 years (that’s how long it’s existed

The early returns are promising. For those four tournaments, LUC scored a precision of 70.3 percent while also identifying 59.4 percent of all upsets, including those of No. 9 seeds over No. 8 seeds. The model had some risky calls that worked in its favor. It gave the 2014 Mercer team a 57.1 percent chance of beating No. 3 Duke. Two years later, it gave No. 13 Hawaii a 55.4 percent chance of beating Cal and No. 14 Stephen F. Austin a 61.5 percent chance of beating West Virginia. Any of these picks would be enough to catapult LUC to the top of most office-pool standings in the first week. (538)

So basically of the upsets, it chooses they are right 70% of the time. That’s the number State fans should care about because NC State is not only on that list of chosen upsets but 2nd on it, giving them an even higher probability.