2008 march maddness brackets

Once again, it is time for March Madness. The three week, 64 game road to the NCAA Championship begins on March 12th or 13th with the play-in game. As I mentioned in Tournament Trends Analysis Part I, seeding is by far the most important factor in a team's tournament success, but I have made it my goal to find out which other factors determine who advances and who doesn't in the NCAA Tournament. In Part I, I analyzed seeding, a team's record in the last ten games, record against the RPI Top 50, road/neutral record and the impact of conference tournaments.
In this analysis, I tested theories on tournament success based on each team's statistics, including field goal percentage, rebounding and turnovers. I used team statistical data from the years 1998-2006 to test my theories. I limited my analysis to games in which the seed differential between the two teams was between 0 and 3 because in those cases the team with better seed won only 51% of the time. In cases where the seed differential was between 4 and 9, the team with the better seed won 74% of the time and because the team with the superior seed tends to have the superior statistics, an analysis of games between teams with seed differentials above 3 would be biased. The following is a list of my theories and a synopsis of my findings.
Disclaimer
Let me start by saying that this site does not support or encourage gambling. I have provided this information for the amusement of college basketball fans and more specifically, stat junkies like myself. If this helps you to fill out your brackets, that's great, but I would never advise anyone to gamble with money that they cannot afford to lose. The beauty of the office pool is that it is very low risk with possible high reward and the tournament is much more interesting when you have someone to root for. The following information is based on trends in the tournament for the past eight to twelve years. There is no guarantee that these trends will continue this season. More importantly, even if these trends do hold true, they give you only a slight edge. Most of what happens in the tourney is pure chance and it takes a lot of luck to do well in your NCAA pool. Please feel free to email me and let me know what you think about the results. However, if you complain to me because you used these trends and they did not work, I will not listen. Use this information at your own risk. Now on to the results.
Theory 1 - The better shooting team will win the majority of the time
My first theory was that good shooting teams (teams with high field goal percentages during the season) would have much more success in the tournament. The way that I see it, defensive intensity increases at tournament time so outside shots will be that much tougher to make. A good shooter (or in this case good shooting team) is much better equipped to overcome tight defensive pressure than a poor shooting team. Because it didn't make sense to compare situations where one team's shooting efficiency was only fractionally better than their opponent, I limited the analysis to situations where one team had an average field goal percentage at least two percentage points better than their tournament opponent. I found 94 such matchups between 1998 and 2006. My theory proved accurate as the team with the higher field goal percentage was 58-36 (62%). When I limited the analysis to matchups between teams with field goal percentages three or more percentage points apart, the better shooting team was 34-21 (also 62%). Even with the small sample, this is fairly strong evidence that the better shooting team has a distinct advantage in matchups of similarly seeded teams.