Okay, so I decided to dive into this whole “March Madness Simulator 2024” thing. I’d seen some buzz about it online, and figured, why not? I’m no coding expert, but I like to tinker.
Getting Started
First, I needed to figure out, well, how to even build one of these things. I poked around the internet and, honestly, most of what I found was way over my head. Lots of complicated-looking Python scripts and talk of “APIs” and “data scraping”.
The Simple (My) Approach
I am not gonna lie, all of that was is intimidating. So, I thought, let’s try to make it basic. I am good with spreadsheets, I mean, who is not? Let’s start there. I opened up a Google Sheet and started inputting all 68 teams that will participate in the March Madness competition. I made some columns for things like:
- Team Name(duh!)
- Seed-I just put that in from the official bracket.
- Some sort of “Power Ranking”.
About power ranking column. I didn’t get too fancy – just gave each team a number from 1 to 100, based on what my gut told me after watching a few games and reading some articles. High number means the team is stronger.
The “Simulation” Part
Now for the fun part. To “simulate” a game, I used a simple formula that used these power rankings. Basically, it looked at the difference in power rankings between two teams. I made it so that the team with the bigger power rankings number is most likely to win, but there is a small chance for upset, cause, you know, it is March Madness!
For each round, I copied the winning teams to a new column. Then I “simulated” the next round, using the same basic formula, until I got down to the final two, and then one overall winner.
Running it Multiple Times
Now that I’ve got the basic setup, I can simply “simulate” this many times by refreshing the calculation, pressing F9 key. It is interesting that with each refresh, the formula re-calculates, and sometimes there is a different winner.
The (Very Imperfect) Results
Is it perfect? Absolutely not! It’s super basic, and probably doesn’t take into account a million factors that real simulators do. But, it was fun to build, and it gives me something to play around with while I watch the actual games.
What I Learned
I realized I just barely scratched the surface. There’s a whole world of data analysis and programming out there that I could learn to make this thing way better. Maybe next year, I’ll try to tackle some of that Python stuff. But for now, I’ve got my janky little spreadsheet simulator, and that’s good enough for me!
It was way more fun than just filling out a bracket randomly.
