New York Times - March 17, 2008
Column by Joel Sokol, associate professor at the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. The North Carolina Tar Heels had a good day Sunday. They beat Clemson for the Atlantic Coast Conference title, were at the top of the polls and were rewarded with the No. 1 overall seed in the N.C.A.A. men's tournament. They have plenty of momentum, not having lost in more than a month. But will they win the championship? Not in my bracket. . . .To test that hypothesis, we at the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech took a four-year sample of college basketball results and extracted the thousands of games in which teams played each other twice during a season. If the purists are right, a team that beats an opponent once, even by only a point, should be more likely to win the rematch because the first victory (however small) shows that it is a better team. Read more>>