Yesterday, my colleague Andrew Scurria questioned why, politically, President Obama would fill out a bracket. Stats guru Nate Silver offers one answer: Obama's picks -- which, as of this writing, have the Leader of the Free World ranked at No. 3,337,106 on ESPN.com -- tend to favor schools in swing states.

Jay Leno asked Obama about this 36-plus minutes into his Tonight Show appearance:

MR. LENO: Like, do you look at the whole picture when you do that? For example, isn’t that a swing state? (Laughter and applause.) I'm just saying, are you looking at the whole picture when you pick?

MR. OBAMA: I mean, the fact that teams from North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, all seem to do well in my bracket –- (laughter) –- I think is a complete coincidence. Absolutely.

Silver's findings were statistically significant (at the 90% level), but probably not significant in any real sense, with 2012 still three years away.

Yet there have been some more meaningful studies to get you through March Madness, and Penn has been at the forefront. In last Sunday's New York Times, two Wharton professors wrote that NCAA hoops teams trailing by one at half are actually more likely to win than teams up by one. More after the jump.

Take a look:

The authors explain the results, which control for factors like home-court advantage, respective winning percentages and which team started with the ball: "The reason is motivation. Being behind by a little leads to victory because it increases effort. Not only do teams down by a point at the break score more than their opponents in the second half, they do so in a particular way. They come out of the locker room fired up and make up for most of the point deficit in the first few minutes of the second half."

Meanwhile, wondering when to give up on your favorite teams? Bill James has a formula: "Take the number of points one team is ahead. Subtract three. Add a half-point if the team that is ahead has the ball, and subtract a half-point if the other team has the ball. (Numbers less than zero become zero.) Square that. If the result is greater than the number of seconds left in the game, the lead is safe."

So fans, hang in there -- even a 20-point lead with five minutes remaining isn't safe yet.

Tags: basketball, ncaa tournament

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Men's Basketball, NCAA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.