What Is the Half-Life of Basketball Teams?

Zdeslav Hrepic
Columbus State University

What do basketball teams have in common with radioactive nuclei? It turns out, there is more
here than first meets the eye. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball
tournaments feeds fans craving when NBA competitions are not in swing and the college
tournament time has been referred to as March Madness or the Big Dance [1] as many fans
participate in “bracketing” i.e. in predicting winners.

During one of the “Big Dances”, the lab activity for the day in my physical science course was
radioactive decay and, at the onset, a group of students (playfully gathered around a chart on a
paper) suggested that instead of worrying about radioactivity, we have some fun “bracketing”
NCAA basketball tournament. At the time, I did not know what the NCAA was nor did I know of
bracketing. However, this physical science lab course targets non-science majors and my best
chance in diverting students attention away from the “proposed” activity was by offering (or at
least suggesting) in exchange something fun and interesting about the originally planned activity.
Still having “my” topic in mind while listening students explain the forecasting procedure, I
realized there are some basic similarities between the tournament progression and the radioactive
decay process. Namely, both of them start with a certain number of constituents (basketball teams
and atoms, respectively) which are progressively excluded (teams eliminated and atoms
disintegrated).

So I suggested that we go on with the originally planned radioactivity lab and I made a
pretentious announcement that understanding radioactivity will put their seeding predictions on
some scientific grounds. Because, I claimed, what they wanted to do is similar to what I was
about to teach. Needless to say students did not believe they should take me seriously nor did they
expected me to deliver on this promise, but they seemed to appreciate the attempt to throw
something of value into the bargain. Likewise, I did not blame them for the lack of confidence in
my promise as I was not sure myself which way and how much of it I would be able to deliver.

However, as I started introducing the topic other interesting and productive parallels became
clear, beyond the simple exclusion similarity. A critical analogy, and perhaps also the most direct
one, is about the half-life of each process. Half-life (t½) is the time required for a quantity to fall
to half its value (half-of the quantity, half-of the effectiveness etc.) as compared the beginning of
the measured time period. In physics, it is typically used to describe a property of radioactive
decay, but it is also used in other fields to describe quantity which follows an exponential decay.

To elaborate on the analogy, I use below the bracket created by President Obama for the 2012
tournament (Fig 1.). The bracket is posted on the White house website [2].
Fig 1. President Obama’s bracket for NCAA 2012 men’s basketball tournament

The NCAA basketball tournaments start with 64 College and University teams. As in any single
elimination tournament, after the first round of games, there are exactly half of the teams left in
the competition. The number is then halved again after another game set round. This is precisely
what happens also after each half-life with radioactive nuclei. So, knowing the dates of game
rounds, a bracket (such as one shown in Fig. 1.) can be used to determine the average half-life of
a basketball team during the tournament. In the case of the NCAA 2012 men’s basketball, the
first round was played on March 15 and 16th starting with 64 teams. For a measure of sampling
we can take three playoff rounds and notice that original “Round of 64” (15/16 March) goes to
“Elite Eight” for March 24/25. The reduction of teams from 64 to 8 accounts for three half-lives
and this occurred in a 9-day period between March 15 and March 24. This makes a half-life of a
basketball team on this tournament three days long. Thus, making basketball teams on a
tournament somewhat short lived “particles”. (Although exact dates for NCAA tournament game
rounds vary in different years, the days of the “Round of 64” and “Elite Eight” are conveniently
held 9 days apart from year to year.)
 Basketball Teams Decay Rate
70

Remaining Teams
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Tournament Rounds

Fig 2. The plot of the number of remaining teams vs. time in units of the number of rounds
completed, resembles an exponential decay curve.

Introductory college physics textbooks typically introduce the topic of half-life by discussing
elimination of the coins. Each coin has a 50% chance of landing on either side. So if the tail side
is assigned as the elimination side, after one throw of a group of coins we can expect that nearly
half of them will “disintegrate". Therefore, a toss of a large number of coins can be considered
equivalent to an elimination round of games in the tournament. Both are further equivalent to the
elimination of half of the nuclei during the half-life of radioactive sample.

One might object that all coins and all nuclei are created (more or less) the same, and all
basketball teams may not be. However, for undergraduate students, basketball teams are (clearly)
more fun to play with (no pun intended), and for this benefit we can assume teams start with
equal chances. As they do, after all, in a tournament. At least “in theory”, i.e. regardless of the
perceived team quality. Furthermore, this distinction and similarity provide another teachable
moment based on this analogy.

At the beginning of the process it is not possible to predict which particular atoms will
disintegrate at any given time. What we do know, however, is that after one half-life, half of the
original nuclei will remain in the sample. Likewise, we do not know which basketball teams will
win in any of the rounds (this is precisely what makes “bracketing“ predictions popular fun.) But
after one game set, exactly half of the teams are eliminated and another half are still playing. And
all chances are renewed again for the next round.

As I kept explaining and pinpointing these analogies to my students, I noticed a combination of

an exciting understanding of the topic and the presented analogies – combined with a
simultaneous disbelief about the fact that I was meaningfully and extensively fulfilling my
promise about finding the parallels between the topics of radioactivity and bracketing.

To take the point one final step further, the coin analogy can be replaced with the tournament
analogy to derive the formula for the decay of nuclei in a radioactive sample in terms of half-life.
The use of coin tossing and counting, as an analogy in mathematics of radioactive decay is
probably familiar [e.g. 3] to many. You start with large number (N0) of coins, throw them all
simultaneously and eliminate, all those that land tail side up. They thus “decayed”, leaving
N=(1/2) (N0) coins. After the next round this is reduced to N=(1/2) 2 (N0)=1/4 (N0). And after n
rounds number of remaining coins is N=(1/2)n (N0).

Equivalently, the analysis is very similar if we start with large number (N0) of single elimination
tournament teams. The pairs play a set of games and losers are eliminated (with “tail side up”).
They thus “decayed”. Which again leaves N=(1/2)n (N0) teams after n rounds.

We point by stating that the half-life (t½) is the average time required for one half of the teams i.e.
nuclei to decay. If the sets of game rounds are evenly spaced (say daily or weekly – as it is for
halving of unstable nuclei), number of rounds (n) can be expressed as a ratio of time elapsed and
half-life time. So n=(t)/(t½).
Thus:
𝑡
1 𝑛 1 𝑡1/2
𝑁 = 𝑁0 ( ) = 𝑁0 ( )
2 2

While exploring similarities between these concepts, it is necessary and worthwhile to stress the
differences inherent in any analogy. And the critical one in this case is the size of the sample.
Namely statistics breaks apart with small numbers and the number of teams in the typical
tournament does not compare to the number of unstable nuclei in any practical sample. Another
important limitation of this analogy is that in true radioactive decay, each atom has exactly the
same probability of decaying within a given amount of time. Pairing teams in a tournament is the
equivalent of creating a situation involving two particular teams where one team will certainly
“decay” and the other will certainly not during a round of the tournament. In this respect the coin
tossing analogy is stronger as the model presented here, unlike the coin-tossing model, pairs
probabilities. The behavior of one coin doesn’t affect the behavior of another, and after all the
coins are flipped and the tails are cleared away, the number of heads remaining is likely not
exactly half the initial number. So it is with independent radioactive atoms after the passage of a
half-life. However, there is no probability at all involved in the determination of the number of
teams remaining after a round of a tournament.

But analogical differences can be just as productive for the target learning as are the similarities.
All models, and especially analogies, have limitations by definition. However they also have a
great scaffolding power for teaching, in addition to utilitarian value. Analogy in general is
considered one of the very fundamental ways humans learn and earlier research showed that
carefully chosen and presented analogies can promote student learning of physics [4, 5]. This
paper proposes a way in which students’ understanding of natural radioactive decay can be taught
or improved by making use of a rich analogy with a very familiar and popular resource – a sports
tournament. Through the proposed analogical scaffolding and follow-up discussion, the instructor
can explore the tournament concept on one side (with which students are very familiar) and
compare them to concepts of natural radioactivity and half-life which are difficult topics and also
typically do not lend themselves easily to demonstration.

While using the tournament model for this purpose, the above listed limitations of the model
should be kept in mind. But at the same time, they themselves can be productively utilized to
deepen students’ understanding by comparing and contrasting a familiar tournament model with
target radioactive decay concept from a variety of angles thus reaching into high levels of the
Bloom’s taxonomy (analysis and evaluation).

References:
1. NCAA Turner Sports Interactive Inc., Big Dance: Rock out at the Final Four 2012.
2. Compton, M. President Obama's 2012 NCAA Tournament Bracket. 2012.
3. Knight, R., B. Jones, and S. Field, Nuclear Decay and Half-Lives, in College Physics.
2010, Pearson. p. 1003-1004.
4. Podolefsky, N.S. and N.D. Finkelstein, Analogical scaffolding and the learning of
abstract ideas in physics: An example from electromagnetic waves. Phys. Rev. ST Phys.
Educ. Res., 2007. 3: p. 010109
5. Podolefsky, N.S. and N.D. Finkelstein, Use of analogy in learning physics: The role of
representations. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res., 2006 2: p. 020101.

Zdeslav Hrepic has a BA in Physics and Polytechnic teaching from University of Split, Croatia
and MS and PhD in Physics Education from Kansas State University. He is an assistant professor
at Columbus State University (GA), and teaches a range of introductory physics courses and
science education courses. His pedagogical and research interests revolve around students’
understanding of a range of physics topics and technology enhanced active learning
environments.
Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA 31907;
drz@columbusstate.edu; www.hrepic.com