Are you tired of the coworker who didn’t watch a college basketball game all year or your 9-year-old nephew or the HOA president who doesn’t know the difference between St. John’s and Saint Mary’s winning the March Madness office pool every year? Are you sick of putting in hours and hours of training in January and February watching Mountain West or Horizon League basketball on some obscure channel only to have your bracket obliterated by Happy Hour on Friday afternoon?
I’m not sure about you, but I’ve never won a bracket contest. Never even come close, really. It’s the same story every year. I talk myself into too many upsets that don’t pan out and completely whiff on double-digit seeds that I never considered, mostly because I watched them at some point and thought there was no way they could win an NCAA Tournament game.
It made for a convenient excuse: I know too much!
But let’s face it, that’s just cope.
Here’s the truth: I stink at this. So do you, though.
And I think I’ve figured out why.
Every year when the bracket comes out, the first thing we do is look at the matchups that interest us. That’s where the problem starts.
People who watch college basketball all year long have all this data in our heads that we’ve accumulated over the past 4½ months, and we form opinions in the abstract about what’s going to happen in March. Then when the bracket comes out and we have actual games to pick, some of those ideas inevitably come into conflict. To figure it out, we become too analytical. We overthink everything, leading to a spiral of bad predictions and busted brackets.
This year, it’s time for a new approach. What if we fill out the bracket before there’s a bracket?
In other words, rather than going line by line once the NCAA men’s basketball selection committee shows us their work, let’s do our work ahead of time and then apply it as strictly as possible before the individual matchups start twisting our brains into a pretzel.
Obviously, you can’t account for every single possibility before actually seeing the bracket. But if you have some principles you’re willing to stick to, you can fill those in right away and then let everything else fall into place.
After watching hundreds of games this season, here are the five tenets of college basketball I’m going to use this year to build my bracket and finally win that office pool (yeah, right). So let’s get to work.
1. Duke is going to win the national championship
It’s fair to question the quality of Duke’s ACC competition because the league just wasn’t very good this year. But using that to discount Duke by association would be a big mistake. This team showed its quality by rolling through the ACC tournament even without future No. 1 overall draft pick Cooper Flagg, who injured his ankle early in the quarterfinal and sat out the remainder of the games. If Flagg is significantly limited, that obviously changes things. But assuming he’s good to go, Duke is the best team in the country.
2. The SEC will get at least five teams in the Sweet 16, but just one in the Final Four
The SEC’s record-setting regular season resulted in more NCAA tournament bids than any conference in history, and it’s hard to argue against a league that won 88.9% of its non-conference games, nearly all of them back in November and December. That remarkable run set SEC teams up to really boost each other’s bracket metrics once they started playing and beating each other.
No doubt there are really good teams in that league. But there are also some things to wonder about.
One of the league’s overachievers — Missouri, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt — will make the second weekend.
That leaves Florida, which is playing its best ball at the right time, to carry the SEC banner all the way to San Antonio.
3. The Big Ten will flop
It’s been 25 years since the league’s last men’s basketball title, and that’s not going to change this time. Between Michigan State, Michigan and Maryland − the top three teams in the regular season − there wasn’t a single nonconference win worth talking about. That’s enough reason to be deeply skeptical of how this league shook out.
But you know who did have some good non-conference wins? UCLA (Arizona, Gonzaga) and Oregon (Texas A&M, Alabama). Those teams, though, had to deal with a brutal travel schedule that undoubtedly impacted their ability to win on the road.
So what I’m going to do with that information is pick those schools to win one round more than their seed suggests and put a ceiling on Michigan State (Sweet 16), Michigan (round of 32), Maryland (round of 32), Wisconsin (round of 32) and Purdue (first round). The Big Ten will be shut out of the Final Four and prove to be a mediocre conference by the end of this tournament.
4. The battered bluebloods won’t pull any miracles
Seeing schools like UConn and Kansas with far worse seeds than normal will make it tempting to pick them as upset possibilities. Don’t. The numbers are pretty clear. UConn just doesn’t have the juice defensively with this team to really bother elite opponents, while Kansas just wasn’t a very good team away from home. They earned their seeds. Don’t be fooled by the branding.
5. The trendy mid-majors aren’t the ones to be worried about
Every single year, there’s a team that nobody wants to see in their bracket, according to the pundits. This year, it’s Drake, Colorado State and Grand Canyon. Lots of people in your pool are going to pick them simply because the college basketball analysts are going to hype them up as upset possibilities. We’re not falling for it. Instead, Utah State and High Point — two teams with great offensive metrics — will be worth a shot to pull first-round upsets.