Methodology Section NCAA Basketball Prediction March Madness Success

Back to Coach Salaries Predict NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Selection


Method Used:
Logistic regression with coach salary (“annual.pay”) as the predictor and selection for 2008 tournament (“finals”), as the response.

The latter was determined by using available 2006 coach salary data from a USA Today Report (N = 61)( ) and coding the data in the following manner:
1 = Made it to the 2008 tournament; 0 = Was excluded from the 2008 tournament.

An equation was then estimated (see below) and coach salary was found to be a statistically significant (p = 0.0483) predictor of probability of success for entry into the 2008 tournament.

Data Used:
Two variables were used for this analysis:

1. Coach salary from 2006 (annual.pay)

2. NCAA Tournament 2008 (finals): 1 = Made it to the 2008 tournament; 0 = Was excluded from the 2008 tournament

Estimated Equation:
logit[finals] = -7.273e-01 + 1.077e-06(annual.pay)

Predicted Probabilities Estimated by:
Starting at $100,000 and increasing in intervals of $100,000, predicted probabilities were estimated using the equation above:
Pi = exp(-7.273e-01 + 1.077e-06(pay))/1 + exp(-7.273e-01 + 1.077e-06(pay))
i = 1 ($100,000),…,15 ($1,500,000)

Salary            Probability of entry into
                        2008 tournament
    $100,000        35%
    $200,000        37%
    $300,000        40%
    $400,000        43%
    $500,000        45%
    $600,000        48%
    $700,000        51%
    $800,000        53%
    $900,000        56%
 $1,000,000        59%
 $1,100,000        61%
 $1,200,000        64%
 $1,300,000        66%
 $1,400,000        69%
 $1,500,000        71%


Raw Result Table from the R statistical package:
Call:
glm(formula = finals ~ annual.pay, family = "binomial")

Deviance Residuals:
   Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max  
-1.728  -1.044   0.719   1.121   1.447  

Coefficients:
                    Estimate        Std. Error   z value Pr(>|z|)  
(Intercept)     -7.273e-01  4.941e-01  -1.472   0.1410  
annual.pay     1.077e-06   5.455e-07   1.974   0.0483 *
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

(Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)

    Null deviance: 78.861  on 56  degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 74.576  on 55  degrees of freedom
AIC: 78.576

Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4


For the raw data: contact us.

Go back to Coach Salaries Predict NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Selection