When I began writing this article I was going for a handy little field guide of pitfalls to avoid when selecting teams for your March Madness bracket, but it turned into a behemoth manual of bracket wisdom. To help you more easily digest all of this bracket wisdom I’ve broken it up into two parts. So here in part 1 I will introduce the best ways to lose your bracket pool; then in part two I will show you how those picks would have turned out for you in this year’s tournament.
Two weeks ago my bracket, I filled out with cheer, but alas at this moment I see it and sneer.
Tis the song of March madness every single year. No matter what strategy I employ or how I pick out my bracket I can never be right. In fact I can never even do well enough to be relevant in the last 2 rounds of the tournament. So every year I swear that I’ll never fill out a bracket again. Unfortunately each year I return to the same old cycle. Today I’d like to warn you, almost full year in advance, of the best ways not to fill out an NCAA Tournament bracket. Thanks to me you will be able to get down to only 147,499,999,999,999,999,994 possible ways to fill out an incorrect bracket. There’s no need to all thank me at once.
Honorable Mention
These methods didn’t make the cut because one of these could just be crazy enough to work.
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Out with the Old, In with the New
- Always pick the school with the youngest coach. 1
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Short and Sweet
- In this method we select a school based on whose name is the shortest. Schools like Virginia Commonwealth and Florida Gulf Coast would be known by their initialism, VCU & FGCU respectively. The first tie breaker is the mascot’s name. The second tie breaker is the head coach’s mother’s maiden name.
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Can’t teach height
- Anyone who has ever attempted to play “My Player” mode in NBA 2k knows what a premium is put on height and how much easier it is to succeed with tall players rather than short ones. The same should hold true for March Madness therefore with this method we select the team with the tallest aggregate starting 5.
Now we reach the 5 strategies you can eliminate for next year!
The Lennay Kekua Challenge
In this method you go through matchup by matchup choosing the school with the most Facebook followers.2 For example in the Iona (1,300 followers) vs. Ohio State (1.3m followers) matchup, Ohio state would advance. In the event of a tie, we ask Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.
Easy as 1,2,3
Yes the ABC method is just as simple as it sounds. This tried and true method of selecting a bracket is definitely tried, by at least one person 3 every single year, but still she never ends up with a perfect bracket proving it to be one of the methods to avoid when the brackets come hot off the press in 2014.
Bigger is always Better
This method, which takes more research than any of the methods preceding it involves figuring out the population of the city that holds each tournament team, 4 and picking the winner based on which team is in the city with a greater population. In the event of a tie, for example if LaSalle was to meet Villanova you are free to choose from one of the two ultimate tie breakers, either the school closest to the site of the game, 5 or the school with the most undergrads.
The True Chalk Choice
For this strategy we go completely by the rankings, because obviously the selection committee knows best. The rankings of which i speak are of course the US News Rankings for the best colleges using the edition for the year of the tournament. If USN lets you down and neither of the schools are ranked you can figure out which group is the brainiest by picking up the most valuable coin you can find, flipping it, and picking the school that comes closest to the result of the coin flip in alphabetical order. To prove just how full proof this method is, suppose you are stuck between two teams that USN wouldn’t have ranked, such as Harvard vs. Duke in the final 4 this year. In this scenario you flip your coin and then realize that you pick Harvard no matter what the result of the coin flip is. See that? Absolutely infallible.
Lady Luck is on my Side 6
This year I felt the field was wide open, so what better way to fill out my NCAA bracket then to flip one of every heavily circulated coin and select the winner based on which side received the highest number of coins flipped for their side. Heads for the higher seeded team and tails for the lower seeded teams. Now if you’ve been counting a quarter, dime, nickel, and penny make up four coins. That led to a ton of ties. In order to break the tie use a 50 cent piece. Lacking that, a bicentennial Quarter or a buffalo nickel will do. 7
