Gramps Bragging Rights Final Prediction Summary - 4/01/2022

 It is April Fool's Day but I am not fooling this evening.  I posted prediction stats this week while my wife and I toured all the great museums over in Kansas City but I did not elaborate on any of the stats.

It was fun driving over on I-70 and seeing exit signs for all the schools I have rated that are both north and south of the freeway.  I would see a sign for Higginsville and tell my wife about their basketball ratings.  Touring KC, we saw some of the great high schools in the area, and, after touring the Truman Museum over in Independence, we passed another good program but it wasn't Truman High.... William Chrisman High School is just a couple of blocks from the Truman Museum.

So HOW did I come up with the statistics for every boys and girls district game and every state playoff game this spring?   Well, I had posted some predictions during late February and early March and averaged over 85% for those contests but I did not post predictions for every game that was played.  After a particular round, I would update my ratings based on the MSHSAA scoreboard for the next round.

So I did the only fair thing to do....  I used my blog ratings for February 10th to track boys' and girls' classes 1, 2, and 3 district games and the early rounds of classes 4, 5, and 6.  Then I used published ratings from February 21st to track every state tournament game.  There were some ratings in early March that I could have used for the large class tournaments but I stuck to the late February ratings.

Now some of you are probably wondering why I would go back and check all those 1080 games? 

Because. Just Because.............

Because it tells me how good the rating model is for rating all 527 girls' teams and all 547 boys' teams.  It tells me if I am on target.

Now I know I have missed rating a few teams that made noise in their district and state tournaments.  After rating all of these teams all year long, I sometimes cheat a little and don't rate the bottom teams in a district, later in the season, especially the small school classes.  I know.  I should treat every school the same but I don't have time to rate all 30 games every Missouri school plays so the lower-rated teams might get an approximate rating.  So like, class 1, district 12, Meadville, Hale, and Brunswick might not be exactly in the right order but they are all 80-85 ratings.  I focused on Northwestern Mendon, the district champ.  Sorry guys.

I spent a lot of time on the large school classes so you would think I might do better there but the statistics suggest I did well in every class.

So if Team A beat team B and had a better rating than team B, that was a win for me.  If team B won, then I compared Team B's rating to Team C or D's rating, whichever advanced to the next round.  I did not cross out the whole bracket like you would in the NCAA picks.  I wanted to know how team B's rating would hold up if they continued winning.

I had someone tell me that anyone could pick 80% of the games just by looking at winning percentages.  I have not checked that out but when I look at the 40% I got right in the NCAA brackets (all six of them), I don't believe anyone can pick 80% without Gramps Braggin Rights ratings in front of them.

I also hope someone might take notice of these results and suggest a better way to seed district and state tournaments.  It wouldn't have to be my ratings.  I could teach anyone with access to an Excel spreadsheet and the MSHSAA scoreboard how to rate basketball teams.

So here are the percentages of correctly picked winners using the 2/10 and 2/21 ratings.

Nearly 83% for nearly eleven hundred games in Missouri high school basketball!

Maybe I should charge a subscription next year to see the Blog?