Trees, Probability And Prediction

In basic Statistics classes, we are often interested in "Tree Diagrams", which provide a visual way for our students to compute how many ways various events can occur. One special example of this is the US National Collegiate Association of America (NCAA) Basketball tournament, which takes place in March of each year. Fans get caught up in "March Madness," and enjoy trying to predict the "Final Four". In this paper, we discuss many aspects of this tournament, including sharing of what the Tree diagram looks like, various probabilities of what different teams will do, and making predictions about what will happen in the First Round and beyond.