For the ESPN March Madness Tournament Challenge this year, I thought I’d do a little more analysis than just President Barack Obama’s Barackets.

After Round 1, da Prez’s Barackets are hurting badly relative to the nation’s performance (see bracket link at bottom). He only got 19 of 32 games predicted correctly. Not much better than a random 16 of 32, or 18 of 32 if the #1 teams were not picked to lose as they have never lost. This poor performance so far left his brackets at just 19.9 percentile among those entered. In other words, 4 of 5 brackets among 8 million are doing better than his (or 6,527,401). That’s kind of terrible and worse than his approval rating, I hate to tell ya!

A lot of brackets got busted with the galore number of upsets this year, but da Prez lost a few more teams than that. However, there is a long way to go with a lot of points remaining to be had. It’s just that with many teams gone, he has a worse chance than the rest of the nation to rebound strongly. Think of it this way, he could still do well to win some consolation prizes in a lottery. He just has fewer tickets than most in the nation.

Meanwhile, my Digital Citizen brackets are flying high with 23 of 32 correct to stand at a nice 91.1 percentile. Beam! 🙂

My more liberal PairoDD set of picks to try and mirror the madness is doing poorly, though, at 37.0 percentile (20 correct).

The “Popular Pick” of what the majority picked for each team, Crowdsource is doing OK at 58.1 percentile (21 correct).

Finally, data miner Nate Silver’s odds, converted to picks, is doing reasonably well at 78.7 percentile (22 correct).

You can see the picks mentioned, and what remains on their brackets, from the links below.

• President Obama
• Data Miner Nate Silver
• Crowdsource (CBS pool)
• Digital Citizen (logical me)
• PairoDD (chaotic me)