Come play March Madness with Talking Chop, 2021 edition

Yes, it’s March again, which means it’s time to do the annual (well, nearly annual, thanks 2020) ritual of pseudo-randomly selecting which of two collections of letters will move forward across a 64-collection tournament. Fun!

No, but seriously, I love March Madness. I still have never watched a men’s college basketball game in my life, but it’s a great way to whip together a model that, for me, is based in absolutely no way in understanding what I’m modeling, and see how it does.

So, here we go, one more time: you should be able to click this link to register in the Talking Chop group. It’s supposed to ask for a password but apparently doesn’t, but if it does, the password is our one-time lord and savior, randyventura.

Anyway, have fun clicking stuff in the manner that best appeals to you. I look forward to either inexplicably having a “good” bracket again (for the third straight contest), or more likely, crashing and burning. I used the same model for 2018-2019 and it did pretty well, but this time, to account for the overall bizarreness of life and sports, I’ve added some more edge case tolerance so we’ll see what happens. Maybe I shouldn’t have changed anything. With a trial size of one it’s not like we’ll really learn either way.