The 68 teams that make up this year’s March Madness field and their first-round pairings will be revealed on national television Sunday afternoon.
This means the uniquely American ritual known as “filling out your bracket” is imminent, too. Crank up the photocopiers.
A few days before the bracket is announced, Auburn, Duke and Houston seem almost certain top seeds in three of the regionals.
The fourth will likely come from the Southeastern Conference, either Florida or Alabama.
Contenders behind these include Michigan State, coached by the venerable Tom Izzo; St. John’s and born-again Rick Pitino; Tennessee; and a pair of Texas teams: A&M and Tech.
Which will be in your Final Four?
Which will be the next national champion?
As a public service, here are some approaches to consider employing in your nearly impossible quest to pick all 67 winners, or at least enough of them to claim first place in the pool of your choice.
Play the percentages. The NCAA defines an upset as a higher seed beating a lower seed, beginning with a No. 11 knocking off a No. 6. (A 10 beating a 7 doesn’t make this cut.)
By this standard, there have been 10 or more upsets in 15 of the past 39 tournaments since the field grew to 64 teams.
The fewest upsets occurred in 2007 (three), and the most came in 2021 and 2022 (14). The annualized average is 8.5 upsets—4.7 in the first round and 3.8 in the round of 32.
The highest seed ever to win the national title was Villanova, No. 8 in 1985. Three other No. 8s reached the finals. Five No. 11s reached the Final Four.
The trick, of course, is knowing which teams will pull of these upsets. The NCAA hasn’t figured out how to predict that with any certainty.
Try the race track strategy. A less scientific way seems to work fairly well when handicapping your garden-variety horse race: Choosing the horse you’ll risk two bucks on to beat all others in the field, based on the colors the jockey is wearing.
The equivalent is a team’s uniform colors, or more precisely, the combinations they don, since nowadays they do a lot more mixing-and-matching, both home and road.
There’s no readily available data on the most successful colors.
Make a game out of it. There have been times in the history of Major League Baseball when the manager of a team mired in a long losing streak resorted to pulling his lineup out of his hat in an attempt to find a winning combination.
Sometimes it worked. A variation could be worth a try in this instance, too.
My suggestion:
Tape your bracket to a dartboard and throw darts at it until you’ve hit one team in each pairing. Those are your first-round winners.
Advance the winners to the next round and repeat. Continue through all remaining rounds.
Have you already tried all three above? Do they seem frivolous to you? Think you can do better?
Here’s a less imaginative—most would say “more serious”—way to go about filling out your bracket.
Instead of starting with the first round, begin by picking your Sweet Sixteen—the teams you think will emerge from the first two rounds.
Then pick the winners of games in the Rounds of 64 and 32 accordingly, including the upsets you predict, keeping in mind the NCAA data on upsets and its definition.
Then pick your Final Four and work backward, again
Finally, choose your national champion and the loser of the title game. These are your Final Four outcomes.
The NCAA has attempted to ascertain the record for most correct bracket selections to start a March Madness.
According to its research, Gregg Nigl of Columbus, Ohio set the mark for the longest perfect start in 2017 when he correctly picked the winners of the first 49 games of that year’s tournament.
Previously, the record was 39 in 2017 and 36 in 2014.
None of these high-water marks involved darts or team colors.
Will anyone ever get all 63 outcomes correct?
Never say never, but the odds strongly suggest it’s unlikely.
A quintillion is defined as a billion billions, or 1 followed by 18 zeroes.
The odds of getting all 63 winners right in a March Madness bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
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Denny Dressman’s 17th book, a collaboration with Kansas City artist Anthony High titled Black Baseball’s Heyday – Capturing An Era in Art and Words, will be published in late June. You can write to Denny at denny
dressman@comcast.net.