DECATUR, Ill. (WAND) — Every March, as millions of Americans scramble to fill out their NCAA tournament brackets, one University of Illinois professor is crunching the numbers behind the madness.
Sheldon Jacobson, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has spent more than two decades studying the data behind the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. His research eventually led to the creation of the website BracketOdds. It's a tool designed to help fans understand the probability and patterns behind March Madness.
“March Madness is a cornucopia of data,” Jacobson said. “As a data analyst and data scientist, I got involved over two decades ago, trying to look at what the data could uncover about what happens during the tournament.”
The project started as academic research with students at the University of Illinois. Jacobson and his team began analyzing how tournament seeds perform in each round, testing whether a team’s seed truly determines how far it will advance.
Their findings revealed something surprising.
“We discovered that in the early rounds, seeds are meaningful,” Jacobson said. “But once you get into the Elite Eight and the Final Four, seeds don’t matter.”
Those insights led to the launch of the BracketOdds website in 2011. At first, it was a small academic project. The site drew about 11,000 visitors in its first year.
Today, it has become a popular resource for basketball fans and data enthusiasts alike.
“Last year we had over 200,000 visitors,” Jacobson said. “It’s a very popular site, and we’ve been covered by most of the major sports outlets.”
Unlike sports betting sites or prediction models focused on gambling, BracketOdds focuses on analytics, historical trends and artificial intelligence. The website allows users to simulate tournament brackets and see how often certain outcomes occur based on decades of data.
It can also help explain why some tournament upsets feel so shocking.
“When people see an upset, they can go to our site and say, ‘How often does that upset happen?’ or ‘How rare is it?’” Jacobson said. “It gives you those kinds of insights.”
Over the years, the site has evolved with input from students and user feedback. It now includes AI-powered bracket simulators for both the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments.
“We really want to provide a service to bridge analytics, data, artificial intelligence and college basketball,” Jacobson said. “And make it in a way that anybody can understand.”
Jacobson said one of the biggest lessons the data reveals is how to actually build a stronger bracket. Instead of starting with the first round and working forward, he recommends doing the opposite.
“The best way to build a bracket is not from the round of 64 forward,” Jacobson said. “Build it backwards and start with the Final Four or Elite Eight and build around that.”
While the numbers can offer guidance, Jacobson said fans should remember that data cannot predict everything.
“The game isn’t played on a computer,” he said. “It’s played on the court.”
Click here for the BracketOdds website.
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