2018 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament

2018 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament

Your case deals primarily with the concepts of expected value and binomial distributions. This case will be based upon the 2018 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament that will just ended last week. There typically is a lot of news coverage of the brackets and all the teams playing and who is going to win the whole tournament, or how they did with their picks. The previous president of the United States even releases his picks in probably more coverage then when the budget is rolled out. And we have been fortunate to have our own school participate in the tournament in the past couple of years. In previous years Quicken Loans and Warren Buffet offered to give a billion dollars to anyone who got a perfect bracket (picked every team correctly).

On one sheet of paper, I would like you to calculate the total number of points you could receive if you got every selection right, the maximum points that are available during each round, the expected number of points that a person would get for the whole tournament, and how many different brackets you would have to pick in order to guarantee yourself getting all the points (four questions). Please show work where practical and to support your answers. Clearly label each question or answer. You can answer the questions in an executive summary format or list them in order. Please describe how you came to the answer in words and use calculations to support your answer. The descriptions can be simple and composed in one or two sentences.

Guidelines:

  • The case must be typed, have your name and class and section, and no alterations can be made with pen or pencil (all questions typed and answered and no alterations to the assignment being turned in).