Top Apps (And Tips) To Dominate Your 2015 NCAA Tournament Bracket

Pageantry. Pride. Pull-up jump shots and post moves …

Perfect.

The NCAA basketball tournament is perhaps the second greatest sports tournament on the planet. The soccer World Cup is the undeniable royalty of global sporting events and events like the rugby and cricket cups are fascinating (if slightly strange from an American point of view) and enlightened events. Nothing on earth matches March Madness for minute-for-minute drama and excitement.

This article originally appeared at ARC — The Application Resource Center from Applause.

Millions upon millions of Americans fill out March Madness brackets ahead of the first games on Thursday. The standard entry fee of $20 for a bracket is enough promise for many people to pony up, looking for a high return on investment. Some people pour over the stats and matchups, looking for every small advantage. Some people pick their alma mater to go all the way, even if it happens to be a lowly basketball school like the Lafayette Leopards. Picking by mascot has always been a popular method (you ever seen an angry Badger?).

No matter how you choose the teams that may advance all the way to the Final Four, one commonality exists: the bracket. When I was young, we had to print our brackets on actual paper, fill them out with pens and turn them in to the tournament organizer who would tabulate the winners manually. I would keep a copy of the bracket, folded in quarters and stuffed into my back pocket, and carry it with me everywhere for the entire month of the tournament.

Of course, the Internet changed all of that.

One of the reasons so many people fill out brackets for the NCAA tournament these days is because it is exceptionally easy to do. The Web is ultimate egalitarian engine of democracy, collaboration and data tracking and storage. The friction of filling out a bracket and tracking how well it performs against a pool of other people is an extraordinarily simple task for the Web. The NCAA tournament is a shining testament to how the power of the Web has changed the behavior of millions of people.

As with just about everything that originated on the Web, NCAA brackets are now a field dominated by smartphone and tablet apps. The mixture of apps and brackets is exceedingly convenient, especially for a tournament like the NCAA men’s basketball championship. The event lasts almost a full month, is played across the country at different locations and times. It is logistically impossible to be glued to the televisions for every game and every play. So instead of carrying around that old folded paper bracket in your back pocket, you can just open up your smartphone to track how your picks are doing.

The Best NCAA Bracket Apps

But which bracket apps are the best? To answer that question, we turn to Applause Analytics* to determine the quality score of all the major NCAA bracket apps.

Unlike our regular ARC 360 industry reports that break down entire app categories based on Applause Analytics scores and attributes, only a handful of apps are pertinent when it comes to tracking NCAA brackets: ESPN, CBS, Yahoo and the official NCAA March Madness app from Turner Sports.

Applause Analytics scores are listed below for iOS and Android with the total number of reviews in parenthesis.

*ARC is owned and operated by Applause.

ESPN Tournament Challenge Android: 40 (3,725) iOS: 42 (2,385)

CBS Sports Android: 68 (13,666) iOS: 47 (4,987)

NCAA March Madness Live Android: 26 (6,780) iOS: 28 (6,100)

Yahoo Fantasy Sports Android: 47 (26,675) iOS: 32 (56,360)

From an app developer’s perspective, the Yahoo Fantasy Sports app is one of the most interesting. In 2014, Yahoo incorporated its bracket app into its primary (and popular) Yahoo Sports app. This year, the Yahoo and Yahoo Fantasy apps are indeed different entities, but are interoperable between the two without having to leave the same app interface. For instance, if you are in the Yahoo Sports app and want to check on your bracket, you can click on it in the app’s menu. The Yahoo Sports app will send you directly to the Fantasy app without having to back out of one app and open a new window for the other. Yahoo is able to perform this nifty trick with the Android “Intents” function in the operating system that allows apps to communicate with each other and use each other’s features.

How To Win Your NCAA Bracket

Apps are the easy part of March Madness. Winning your tournament pool is where a certain amount of skill and luck come into play.

I won my bracket last year, correctly choosing only one Final Four team (Florida), but dominating most of the bracket until the end. On the first Thursday of the tournament, I chose 15 or 16 winners and road that success all the way to the money. I have won or made money in the NCAA tournament pool three out of the last four years. I have a pretty good idea of what I am doing.

I firmly believe that too much knowledge of college basketball is a detriment when picking winners in the NCAA tournament. Basketball nerds tend to overanalyze matchups. Crazy things happen in the tournament, that’s what makes it so much fun. At the same time, knowledge of the game is helpful in knowing what lower seeds are stronger than they look on paper.

If you are looking into the stats to make your picks this year, here are a few key pieces of data to look for:

• Offensive Rebounding: Basketball is a game of possessions. Teams that can give themselves second chance on a regular basis tend to perform well in the tournament. This year, fifth-seed West Virginia is the top offensive rebounding team in the country. North Carolina and Baylor are also in the top five.
• Turnover Margin: Getting extra possessions through steals and forced errors is the best way to break an opponents attack on a consistent basis. Virginia Commonwealth is consistently one of the best in the nation at this aspect of the game.
• Assist To Turnover Ratio: Teams that can distribute the ball for baskets without giving it up tend to maximize possessions. Tenth-seeded Davidson is the best in the country at this skill with Wisconsin, Gonzaga and Notre Dame all in the top five.
• Three-Point Field Goal Percentage Against: Upsets happen when free-shooting teams hit a lot of three point baskets against a higher seed. Top seeds that can defend the three-point line tend to avoid being stomped on by would-be Cinderellas. Kentucky is the top team in the tournament against the three.

As for bracket strategy, here are a few key tips to maximizing your picks:

• Pick Upsets Early, Then Erase Them: Yes, several lower seeds are going to pull off stunning upsets in the first round. But precious few of those advance past the first weekend. George Mason (No. 11 seed in 2006) and VCU (No. 12 in 2011) were some of the only double-digit seeds to make it all the way to the Final Four in the last decade. Dayton (No. 11 in 2014) made it all the way to the Elite 8 last year. You can pick upsets, but the real points in the bracket come in the second and third weeks of the tournament, where the higher seeds shine.
• Maximize For Later Rounds: An extension of the first tip. If you have any chance at winning your bracket, you are going to need at least 14 teams in the Sweet 16, five of the Elite 8 and probably two in the Final Four, including one of the teams playing in the championship game. Bonus if you pick the actual championship winner. Know that at least one and maybe as many as four lower seeds (any team below a five-seed) are going to make it to the Sweet 16.
• No Seed Below A Four In The Final Four: Bracket busters bust brackets for a reason: nobody picked them to go all the way. If you didn’t pick them to go all the way, chances are that few other people did as well.

My Final Four picks: Kentucky, Arizona, Virginia, Iowa State.

Lead image: Go Rams by Flickr user Will Fisher, Creative Commons.