Upsets and Other Random Thoughts

So far I've seen three upsets tonight, Hoosick Falls over Mechanicville in the boys and in the girls Ichabod Crane over Cohoes and Greenwich over Waterford.  In the final forecast I posted before the seedings came out, Mechanicville was ahead of Hoosick Falls in the rating by .017, but was ranked 6 to Hoosick Falls' 10. That is a very small difference, one that can be made up by one of your opponents losing a game they should have won.  In that sense, I'm not totally shocked at the result.  One reason I picked (in my biased analysis) Greenwich over Mechanicville was because of the threat Hoosick Falls brought to the table.  It was a safer pick as I didn't think Greenwich's first round opponent wasn't going to cause any problems.  In this case the model was right to give less credit to Mechanicville's record that other may have suggested.  On the girls' side however, the same cannot be said.

Upsets happen all the time, and sometimes it's difficult to determine a true upset from poor seeding by the committee (or my model).  Ichabod over Cohoes was a true upset and it happens, that's why no one gets all the games right.  Greenwich over Waterford however, was not.  I was extremely worried about this game and how the models perceived it after Schuylerville crushed Emma Willard.  This is a case where the model was extremely wrong and after witnessing how poorly the CHVL has done so far, I'm pretty convinced Waterford's undefeated league record was entirely due to how bad the rest of the conference was as opposed to how good they were.  I do think they are better than this showing, but certainly not a contender in this tournament.  The good news for me is that this is better data than the one season I previously had and next year the model will be better for it.

A couple other games of note, mostly for their MOV's.  In the boys, Berne-Knox beat Maple Hill by 30 points.  I heard some talk this might be a close game and the COA had it at 17 points in BKW's favor.  Since I have them beating Lake George, I'm going to take that as a good sign.  Also, the COA had Troy only 1 point ahead of Saratoga Springs, and while I wasn't buying that it would be that tight of a game (COA relied heavily on the CBA-Bethlehem game that did not feature Marini), I was surprised to see it was only a 13 point game.  The Suburban has been a little inconsistent this year, but their COA numbers matched up really well against the Big 10 and I really do believe this is their best chance in years to dethrone CBA and the Big 10 from AA supremacy.

Updated:
One quick point of clarification.  When I was referring to how the model evaluated Mechanicville's chances, I was referring to their SFR which was below that of a team to win a first round game, not their actual seed as the committee and the forecast both had them as 6 seeds.