How To Succeed at Brackets Without Really Trying

A handy guide to crafting one shining moment of your own.

Folks, it’s hard to believe it, but March Madness is back.

Sure, it’s only been a year since we last danced The Big Dance, but it feels like longer, doesn’t it? After a weird, stilted, COVID-afflicted tournament season in 2021—and the outright cancellation of postseason play in 2020—it’s nice to have the NCAA basketball tournaments back in full force this year.

It’s just not springtime without them.

Chances are, you’re one of the tens of millions of people trying to fill out a bracket right now. Whether it’s for a small office pool, a challenge among a group of friends, or one of the massively-multiplayer online contests sponsored by sites like ESPN or Yahoo!, you’ve got some picks to make, and you want to make them right.

But wait!

What if you didn’t watch much college basketball during the regular season?

What if you don’t even really follow college basketball at all, but you’re bowing to peer pressure or getting caught up in the moment?

What if you don’t have any idea who to pick???

Fret not.

I’m something of an expert on the subject—a “bracketiatrist”, as they call me—who once finished in the 94th percentile of online brackets in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge. I think it was in 2016, or maybe 2017? It doesn’t matter.

It can be daunting to look at a field of 68 teams about to play 67 games over the course of three-plus weeks and try to predict exactly what’s going to happen. If you’re an educated viewer like me, though, you start to see patterns, trends, signals within the noise. You can sniff out each team’s advantages and disadvantages, their crises and opportunities. If you stare at it long enough, the fuzzy Magic Eye poster that is an unfilled bracket suddenly starts to look like a schooner, and that schooner is about to sail you off to Big Winner Bay.

Now, I can’t tell you exactly who’s going to win each game—the sportsbooks’d have my kneecaps—but I can tell you a few things to look for as you fill out your brackets.

Won’t you join me?

WHO’S HOT, AND WHO’S NOT?

Many brackets list the overall regular-season records of each team right next to their name. It can be tempting to let this number influence your pick, but tread carefully! The season is long, and teams’ fortunes can shift up and down throughout the season.

It’s instructive, I think, to look at their record over the past ten games.

Consider a team like the men’s #14 seed Colgate, who enter the tournament on a 15-game winning streak. They have foolishly spent all of their wins before the tournament starts, and now have none left. They are like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, and now they will starve over the winter. They are not wise like the ant, or like Michigan State, who scrupulously went 4-6 over their last ten games and have plenty of wins left now.

ALWAYS PICK A #12 SEED OVER A #5 SEED

When the NCAA Selection Committee assembles the bracket each year, the seeds aren’t a strict way of ranking teams from #1-68; other factors come into play, like strength of conference, recent play, bribery and more.

The 5-versus-12 games are traditionally the “prank” seeding, where the NCAA cleverly sets seemingly-good teams up to fail. If your team is seeded #5, this is the basketball equivalent of Johnny Knoxville asking you to bring a tray of hot soup in from the other room. Everyone knows something bad is going to happen, including you, but we all have faith that it will be very funny.

ALWAYS PICK A #1 SEED OVER A #16 SEED

Now, this might seem a little riskier. 12-seeds score upsets practically every year, but in the history of the men’s tournament’s 64-plus-team field, a 16-seed has upset a 1-seed only one time ever, when UMBC upset Virginia in 2018.

Do not let this scare you off. This is a no-risk, high-reward bet. If you pick this correctly, you will look like a genius and will be able to brag about it for years. If the 16-seed does lose, though, you can simply argue that you obviously just clicked the wrong thing and did not intend to make that pick and bad UI design shouldn’t be held against you because c’mon you didn’t actually think Georgia State was going to beat Gonzaga that would be ridiculous! Unless it happens. Then you’re a bracket wizard.

CONSIDER PRESTIGE

Is there a school in the bracket that you’ve never even heard of, let alone can identify where they’re from, what conference they’re in, or what their mascot is? Pick them. They’re not coasting on name recognition. I have no idea who Longwood is but they are obviously going to beat Tennessee.

HOW TOUGH IS THEIR MASCOT?

There’s a lot of teams with fierce mascots out there. Bulldogs. Wildcats. Bears. Tigers. Catamounts. These teams are obviously overcompensating for something.

Consider the University of San Francisco Dons, whose mascot pays homage to Don Francisco de Haro, the first mayor of San Francisco. A civil servant as a mascot? There’s a team that doesn’t have to prove anything to you. Pick them.

CONSIDER THE RIGORS OF TRAVEL

Theoretically, teams are seeded by region—East, West, South and Midwest—and kept closer to home for the early rounds, before the champions of each region meet in the Final Four. Of course, this regional seeding isn’t perfect, as the geographic distribution of teams rarely lines up perfectly with the regional sites. For some teams, this might mean a trip all the way across the country. Take the implications of this under careful consideration.

A team like the Southern Cal Trojans might look good on paper, but they’ve got to travel nearly 2,600 miles east to Greenville, NC. USC’s coaches and players will undoubtedly take this rare opportunity to see Greenville’s many sights and attractions such as the East Carolina Village and Farm Museum, and they may forget to practice basketball.

LOOK AT THE COACHES

Stuck on a matchup? Do a Google Image Search for both head coaches.

Which coach looks more like the wealthy and successful owner of a chain of local car dealerships—a respected pillar in their community and employer of dozens, a philanthropy-minded civic booster who helped rebuild the community band’s gazebo after that unfortunate fire last summer, a dutiful sponsor of the local high school sports teams—a man who’s just seen a team of FBI investigators pull up outside one of those dealerships just as he was about to show this lovely young couple a 2022 Ford Edge that would be perfect for them with that baby on the way but who now realizes the delicate web of financial crimes, fraud and deceit he’s woven over the last fifteen years is about to unravel before his eyes—and which coach looks more like he just landed on a dollar spinning the big wheel as a contestant on The Price Is Right?

Pick the second guy.

TRY SOME NUMEROLOGY

Take the letters in the school’s name, and assign a number value to each letter—A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on. Add those numbers together, then divide that sum by the number of letters in the name.

Is the resulting number 9?

No?

Huh. I really thought that would work.

OPEN YOUR MIND TO OTHER KINDS OF PRINCESS ANALOGIES

There’s nothing fans love more during March Madness than a “Cinderella” story. Whether it’s NC State in 1983, George Mason in 2006, Butler in 2011 or Valparaiso in 1998, viewers thrill over these humble handmaids who magically transform into the belle of the ball before the clock strikes midnight. Any bracketeer would love to pick the next Cinderella.

To me? That’s tired.

You should be trying to identify the next Princess Alexandra of Bavaria, the 19th-century German royal who for decades harbored the illusion that she had swallowed a grand piano made of glass as a child and lived in constant fear of shattering it, going so far as to move through doorways sideways.

It will be difficult for an Alexandra of Bavaria team to win.

ACCEPT THE FUNDAMENTAL FUTILITY AND LUDICROSITY OF ATTEMPTING TO ACCURATELY PREDICT SIXTY-SEVEN DISCRETE YET INTERDEPENDENT EVENTS, THE RESULTS OF WHICH CANNOT BE KNOWN IN ADVANCE BY ANYONE, NOT EVEN THE PARTICIPANTS

You never could have predicted that fate would bring you to Prague that one bitterly-cold winter’s night all those years ago, or that you would find warmth in that dimly-lit bar down the alleyway. When you stumbled in and shook off the snow, your eyes connected with a beautiful stranger across the smoke-filled room. You did not speak each other’s language, but it need not have been spoken for the two of you to know that your connection transcended words. You fell into each other’s arms, and fell madly in love; you spent the most thrilling night of your life together, but when you woke up in the morning, they were gone, a whisper on the wind, having left no trace behind—not a number, not a name, not a shred of evidence. You retraced your steps the next evening, and though it took you hours, you located the alleyway again—you were sure of it, the red door with the three-headed lion carved into it, yes! This was the place. You knocked, sure that the barman would know their name, lead you back into their arms. Your heart stopped as the door opened, and you beheld a humble bakery, the air clouded with flour instead of smoke. You were sure this had been the place—how? The mystery would haunt you until your dying day.

See? You couldn’t have predicted any of that, and that’s like eight events, tops. How the hell are you going to get sixty-seven?

PICK AGAINST DUKE

Because f**k ‘em, that’s why.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

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