  The main objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the
margin of victory can be predicted solely by the rankings of the opposing teams
in NCAA Division I men's basketball games. Several past studies have modeled
this relationship for the games played during the March Madness tournament, and
this work aims at verifying if the models advocated in these papers still
perform well for regular season games. Indeed, most previous articles have
shown that a simple quadratic regression model provides fairly accurate
predictions of the margin of victory when team rankings only range from 1 to
16. Does that still hold true when team rankings can go as high as 351? Do the
model assumptions hold? Can we find semi- or non-parametric methods that yield
even better results (i.e. predicted margins of victory that more closely
resemble actual results)? The analyses presented in this paper suggest that the
answer is "yes" on all three counts!
