NCAA Tourney Analysis

I have participated in NCAA tournament bracket pools for several years. For the last five or six years, I have been using my own formula to rank the teams in the field as a starting point for my picks. With this strategy, I have won twice in those few years. This is not to say that I follow the quantitative analysis this project creates to the letter, but rather, it is a starting point. Other qualitative factors such as success in the last ten games, suspensions, etc. also play a part, but are considered on a case by case basis and are not factored in here (just as a company may be doing very well financially, but is being pummeled in the media, the numbers don’t tell the whole story).

Although not strictly a “business problem,”  the analysis I created could be used in quite a number of financial analysis such as ratio, EPS, and other analyses. For example, if I were asked to analyze certain financial ratios of ten different companies within the same industry, without VBA automation (or another kind), I would need to pull their 10-K or other reports, plug the numbers into a spreadsheet, and churn the numbers from there. VBA gives the advantage in that I could automatically pull all these data from the respective websites and do the work for me.

The system creates a data analysis based on a formula. Please notice that there are two buttons on the NCAA Tourney tab on the ribbon to run the program. The first, designated by a picture of a basketball and named “Set Up,” runs the entire program to calculate the raw score (although several programs from within module one are called). The second button opens the user form which interprets the data by comparing two selected teams. The advantage of this user form is that it is not dependent on the bracket (e.g., if you are doing a pool in which you play round by round rather than from the beginning, you can compare any two teams in the field even though they may have not played in the first round). By clicking on two teams within the list boxes, the program will evaluate whether a potential upset is plausible (or in the real world, how poorly one company may be doing in comparison to another).

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12w/ba66/VBA_Final_Write_Up.pdf
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12w/ba66/Absher_NCAA_FinalProject.xlsm