I’ll go ahead and chalk up the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament as a moderate success for the RotoViz March Madness app.  There are some things that I was happy with and some things that I think can be improved.  I think the app did give a hint on some matchups that were probably closer than people thought they would be, which was good.  In general I was happy with the way that SOS ended up impacting the predictions of the app, although I do think the app overweighted the quality of the ACC and that’s likely going to be important for the app’s pick of Duke as the winner of the tournament.  Also, my general theory on the tournament is that the lack of a home court advantage is the source of a lot of what we might perceive to be upsets, so that’s actually one area that I have marked down for further work.  In any case, for the first time around the block, I think the app was in general a success and it could use more work.  That work will have to wait for next year because the kind of changes that I think might be in order are high level tweaks to the model, like the aforementioned home court advantage.