I love the look of this, but I have one suggestion to make. If the probability for a particular round is < 1%, I would at least leave one decimal place or show "< 1%" instead of having 0%, since obviously there is still some chance of the team making it to that round, even if it's a fraction of a percent.
A bit off topic, but I find it odd how the 16-seed teams are calculated at between 1-4%, even though no 16-seed team has made it past the first round in the entirety of the 64-team tournament (1985: 29 years x 4 teams = 0 for 116).
Not sure how any of these have more than a <1% chance, let alone 4%.
The usual method for calculating these percentages is to calculate a power rating for each team, then to use the log5 formula[1] to arrive at the percentage chance of a team winning.
So, the 1-4% chance of a 16 winning is the result of applying the log5 algorithm to their power ratings.
Also remember that there's only 80 16-vs-1 games in 20 years, and only expanded to 64 teams in 1985, so it's totally possible that there is a 1-4% chance for a 16 to beat a 1 and it just hasn't happened yet.
If I can be a complete jerk, but improvement is based on feedback, etc., a couple of modifications:
* edit the lower values (2% or less, especially at the center) to reflect unlikely but possible events: most people (rightfully) assume that 0% means: not possible, as in, against the laws of nature. Very unlikely is more 0.1 or 0.01%; it’s a huge hassle, but from experience those are worth all the days spent on that -- I've done it enough times in LaTeX, R and D3.js to know…
* use the team colors for the tone; it's cheesy, but fans would love that;
* use the likelihood to reach that point as an opacity factor: opacity is a fairly intuitive way of expressing something.
Finally, if you want newspapers to re-use it, make version with a black and white background. Yes, I should do all that myself, rather than comment… Yes, it would be easier for you all to comment before I gather the courage and try.
Indeed — but the thing is to make that conditional with the size of the number and not mess up with the layout. Doable, but it's the kind of thing that makes a great presentation hours away from a usable one.
As for the highlight… Yes, I though about that, but it makes things complicated: you have to decide what threshold to cut, and sport team fans are very passionate, so that would ostracise the remaining teams.
Am I the only one that was hoping I could fill in the bracket by clicking on a team to see the probabilities of different matchups (vs. the overall probability of each individual team for each round)?
