A coda to brackets
Following sports is never as social as you want it to be. You can go to bars to watch basketball games. You can text about them with friends. But really, it boils down to checking scores on your phone and watching highlights on your laptop at work. Except in March — when suddenly your whole office gets, for some reason, really into college basketball.
I’m no stranger to March Madness brackets. Every year, I run a pool for my friends, and always have at least one going at work. When I joined Coda two months ago, my new CEO Shishir asked if I’d like to spearhead our March Madness pool (being a data scientist apparently auto-qualifies you for this type of thing). I figured I would just email the company with a link to Yahoo! Sports or ESPN. “No,” he said, “you should do it in Coda.”
… Madness.
As the resident newbie of the company, I didn’t feel qualified to build this potentially intricate doc. But at the very least, I could use this opportunity to learn the ropes of Coda. At best, I would create the most intricate doc ever known and revolutionize the way the world plays March Madness.
Fueled by my lofty ambitions, I began like any great artist would: By copying someone else. I looked at Coda’s 2017 March Madness doc, and shamelessly lifted as much as I could. Luckily, the author Brett was around to walk me through it. And together, we outlined how a revised version would work.
It started with three base tables.
1. The Teams Table
This table housed the 64 teams in the tournament, and it auto-updated based on the results of the next table…
2. The Games Table, the main engine.
The Games table tracked each game and the information needed for scoring. Notice how when you select a team in Round 1, it shows up in Round 2. (Lookups are essentially magic.)
Grouping by Round and Region made it simple to drill down into any part of the bracket.
3. A “My Picks” Table.
There needed to be a dead-easy way to select picks, or else no one would use this. (My coworkers aren’t lazy/unmotivated, they’re just busy imagining the future of docs.)
I made it so peoples’ first round picks flow into the second. This way, you could only select from your earlier picks.
Now a fancy Leaderboard View.
If the rest of the doc was the engine, the leaderboard view was the slick exterior that everyone judged. I added the basics like tracking total points per person and points possible remaining. Then my coworkers supercharged the table with conditional formatting and additional scoring metrics.
A View for Comparing Brackets.
As the tournament went on, people added more and more features to the doc. My favorite was this bracket comparison view. I’d never seen anything like it on other platforms. Plus it made trash-talking much easier.
The real question.
Why should *you* use Coda for March Madness? Because collaboration makes things so much more interesting.
When you run an office pool with a conventional tool like Yahoo! Sports, people select teams, then passively follow along with diminishing attention. With Coda, people are actively participating all the way through, building out new views to track progress and highlight special events, and even inventing new metrics. I wouldn’t say this March Madness doc was my baby, but if it were, the Coda village raised it. ‘Sports bring people together’ and what-not — and with Coda, even more so.
If you decide to use a Coda doc next year, 1) let me know if you want me to share this doc with you, and 2) I have a few pointers:
- Use Zapier to auto-update game results.
- Have fun with the scoring methods (i.e. create other methods besides the usual 2x per round scoring method, like underdog picks or picks against the group consensus).
- Allow for consolation picks after brackets become busted early (sorry, UVA fans).
- Create a place to track the trash talk so you can throw it back in people’s faces later.
P.S. Congrats to Brett for winning our pool.
