How To Fill Out A Bracket
The only things you need to know to be successful in your NCAA Tournament pool
Acceptance
First off, accept that you won’t win your pool. You might win. But you won’t win. Once you’ve accepted the reality of your situation, it’s very freeing. You are spending upwards of $5 for the enjoyment of watching upsets and ultimately losing when you picked the wrong ones. This is the way of the world.
Don’t drive yourself mad with metrics
You will be tempted to check out the metrics, from Ken Pomeroy to FiveThirtyEight to ESPN’s BPI. You might put stock in the NCAA’s own RPI (though why you would, I don’t know). You might look up the historic averages of upsets per first-round seed pairings and determine you need two 9 seeds to advance and two 12s and one 11 and one or two 10s and one risky pick of either a 13 or a 14 to knock someone off. Or you may do none of these things and play it conservative, putting your faith in the overall odds of top seeds generally prevailing.
Meh.
You might as well pick by mascots.
Since you won’t win and no system guarantees you’ll be better positioned to do so, you should just pick who your gut tells you will win and don’t do anything stupid like pick a 15 seed to make it to the Elite Eight or a 16 to upset a 1.
Here’s all you really need to know about the numbers:
- Don’t pick too many upsets.
- Don’t put too many low seeds in the later rounds.
And the following . . .
When in doubt, pick teams you can root for
If you hate Duke but you think you should pick them because the Vegas odds say Duke will win, don’t pick Duke. You’ll make yourself sick. When in doubt, one of the best ways to ensure you enjoy the Tournament is to go with the team you want to win.
One of the better things to do is pick your champion and your Final Four first. If there’s a team you really can’t stand, then don’t have them going that far. Even if they win, you’ll have more fun rooting for them to lose.
That stated, this does not mean picking your favorite team to defy the laws of the universe. For instance, I went to UVA. I will always root for them. However, I am also a reasonable man, and so picking them to win it all is not going to happen. I will, on the other hand, be stupid enough to pick them to go a round or two farther than they should. Such is fandom.
Instead, make your Final Four picks generally from the 1 to 4 seeds through some combination of who you think will win and who you want to win. Maybe throw in a wild card from 5 to 8. Lower seeds have happened, but that’s also getting a little crazy. But hey, whatever, if you’re feeling it, go for it. (FYI: the lowest seed ever to make a Final Four was an 11. It’s happened three times.)
And that’s it.
But I’ll reiterate: you won’t win. Remember that and everything will be fine.
Dane A. Wisher is based in Brooklyn.
