The NCAA Tournament is irresistable to OR types. Predicting the tournament has proven a rich area of application. Jay Coleman of the University of North Florida has a scorecard approach that gives probabilities of wins for every game in the first round. For three of the 32 games, his approach favors the lower seeded team (including number 10 Alabama over number 7 Marquette. As far as number 1 seeds go, his method gives a 99%+ chance to Villanova and Duke in their first game (a number 16 has never beat a number 1) but just 97% for UConn and 95% for Memphis.
Joel Sokol of Georgia Tech has done a lot of work in this area. He has some interesting comments on the 2006 brackets.
INFORMS has some other pointers in this area.
Anyone else like to talk about their OR approaches to this?