There’s math to the Madness.
With college basketball’s wildly popular March Madness tournament starting next week, a North Carolina-based stats whiz is urging fans to crunch their numbers before submitting their picks to their office pools.
Davidson College math professor Tim Chartier told The Post that he and his students have been working on algorithms to assist fans — and he’ll be sharing their knowledge on digits and dunks at the National Museum of Math on East 26th Street in Manhattan on Thursday.
There’s no foolproof formula, Chartier said — but he’s hoping his methods will give fans an edge.
“You use math, but you have to use intuition as well,” he said.
All of the formulas have you pick out factors that are given extra weight.
For example, some equations favor teams that win games away from home. Others reward those who win against the toughest foes.
Other formulas downgrade margin of victory, because some seemingly one-sided final scores were actually close contests, driven up by late free-throw shooting.
This year, Chartier said he and his math minions are specifically working on new methods to try to better measure one of sports’ most hard-to-quantify factors — momentum.
But the base line of all Chartier’s formulas is a team’s strength of schedule.
Under Chartier’s most basic formulas. Arizona has consistently come out on top.
But with slight twists in favor of negated margin of victory or late-season momentum, suddenly Florida is the professor’s team to beat.
“Your strength of schedule is always going to be the main ingredient to everything,” Chartier said. “And that’s the same with all the other factors too.”
“Yes, you have momentum down the stretch, but are you doing that against good teams? You’ve been able to sustain winning streaks, but are you doing that against good teams?”
The North Carolina resident said you have to fight against your emotions when picking your favorites.
“There are such strong feelings around here. [Rivals] don’t want to let Duke or North Carolina do well, so that kind of defeats the purpose [of using math],” he said.
Chartier has been having students in two of his classes make evaluations of teams and fill out brackets since 2010.
In that first year, one of Chartier’s students, Daniel Martin, finished in the 99th percentile of ESPN’s bracket contest.
Then last year, Davidson cheerleader Jane Gribble used her beautiful mind to finish in the 96th percentile on ESPN.
This year’s March Madness could have a greater draw for at least 1 billion reasons. Quicken Loans, with the backing of Warren Buffett, has promised $1 billion to anyone who fills out a perfect NCAA bracket sheet.