Ratings and tournament bracket are updated for 2013

This script generates a plausible set of NCAA Tournament predictions. It uses Ken Pomeroy's College Basketball Ratings for team strengths, and Bill James' log5 method to predict which team will win each game. The result is a bracket where the better team is the predicted winner most of the time, but some upsets will occur due to randomness.

This method is no more likely to generate a winning pool entry than most others, but it does save you from your biases or from pretending that you have some special insight into the NCAA tournament field. Run the script and copy the results into your bracket. That's it.

It needs to be updated each year with the updated Pomeroy ratings and the tournament field. The names of the teams in the picker script also need to match the ones in Pomeroy's ratings perfectly or the script won't work. The scraper.rb script tries to scrape the ratings from Ken Pomeroy's site, but it will break if he makes any serious changes to the markup for the page.

The teams for 2013 are all entered and the final ratings are included, so there's no reason to run the scraper. See sample-results.txt for sample output.