Picking winners?
The 2023 Division I Field Hockey Championship is underway. The tournament comprises eighteen teams - the ten conference champions plus eight ‘at large’ teams selected by the NCAA. This year’s teams are:
North Carolina (ACC Champion)
Northwestern (Big Ten Champion)
Duke
Maryland
Virginia
Rutgers
Liberty
Harvard (Ivy League Champion)
Louisville
Iowa
Saint Joseph’s (Atlantic 10 Champion)
Syracuse
Old Dominion (Big East Champion)
American (Patriot League Champion)
William & Mary (CAA Champion)
California (America East Champion)
Miami (OH) (MAC Champion)
Sacred Heart (NEC Champion)
The tournament is structured as a single elimination tournament. Four teams received a seeding - #1 North Carolina, #2 Northwestern, #3 Duke and #4 Maryland. The four lowest-ranked teams - William & Mary, Sacred Heart, Miami (OH) and California - compete in a play-in round with the loser eliminated and the winner progressing to the First Round of the tournament. The play-in rounds were completed earlier today with William & Mary, and Miami (OH) progressing to the First Round.
We used the model to prepare our expected bracket just before the tournament started and updated it with the results from the Play-ins (see Figure 1). The teams in orange indicate which teams our model predicts will progress. Our model uses data on goal differences and home field advantage from throughout the regular season and conference championships to predict the goal difference and, hence, winner of a particular match. The use of goal differences rather than say, win percentage or strength of schedule, means that the model tends to favor teams like Iowa and Syracuse, which have a lower Rating Percentage Index (RPI) than their First Round opponents in Louisville and Liberty.
Figure 1: Expected bracket for the NCAA Championship 2023. Team names in white indicate match-ups from the draw and/or actual results. Team names in orange are match-ups derived from predicted match outcomes.
North Carolina and Northwestern have been the two strongest teams in 2023 and, according to our model, they have the best chance of making it to the Grand Final. We have North Carolina as a slight favorite for the title.
We will use the tournament and data from earlier the season to determine whether the relatively straight-forward model, and its underlying premise of using goal differences to predict results provides a reasonable foundation for exploring further model development. In the interim, we look forward to following the 2023 Division I Field Hockey Championship this weekend.
Disclaimer: This post has been prepared for entertainment purposes only.