The March Madness tournament begins on Thursday and as the name implies, madness is synonymous with this competition — you never know what to expect.
In the tournament 64 teams compete in a single elimination format and a single loss ends a team’s season. This can be a nightmare for the best teams during the regular season since it only takes one night against a hot team you didn’t know existed to undo all the work done during the regular season.
March Madness is so unpredictable, it is nearly impossible to fill out a perfect bracket and predict the winner of each game. For those without basketball knowledge, your chances of this are one in 9.2 quintillion and for those of us who know a thing or two about basketball, the odds are still only one in 120 billion.
This means that everyone has a chance of filling out the best bracket in their friend group. So how should you fill out your bracket?
The boring way
The tournament is divided into four regions of 16 teams, each seeded 1-16, meaning that the best team is ranked no.1 and the worst is ranked no.16.
A decent strategy is just picking the higher seed. This will likely get you one of the better brackets in your friend group, but it’s extremely boring.
Filling out the bracket, you are just picking the highest number and disregarding the madness in March Madness; you can do better.
Research
For those who keep up with college basketball, you could research matchups and deeply analyze how each team plays into each other to create what you think is a well-researched and logical bracket.
I am here to tell you that researching the bracket is a massive waste of time. You could pour in hours of research into your bracket but unfortunately, March Madness does not care about logic. The tournament often sees unlikely results and leaves well-researched brackets in the dust after the first or second round.
If you have the basketball knowledge, applying it to the bracket is still useful but don’t expect it to carry your bracket far.
Hometown heroes
Finally, a real strategy.
This method involves picking teams because of a connection you have to the school or area they play in.
If this is your method of choice, you might be disappointed as the men’s tournament does not feature any teams from Colorado, but the women’s tournament features both Colorado and Colorado State.
Of course, those are only two teams in the 64-team field, and you’ll need to pick the winners in games not involving either team.
For these matchups, begin looking for any connections you have to these schools. Maybe your grandparents live in Virginia, so you’ll pick the Cavaliers during their matchups or maybe your cousin’s friend’s neighbor took a tour of the Louisville campus once, so you’ll pick the Cardinals.
A lot of times, picks come down to your opinion of the school’s city or state. Do you like the beaches of California or Florida better, this might help for the UCLA vs. UCF matchup.
Vibes
Arguably the most fun way of filling out a bracket is picking winners purely off vibes. From the name of the school, its colors, mascot and whatever else leaves lasting first impression.
Some fan favorites from previous tournaments saw 9 out of 10 dentists pick Colgate University as their tournament winner and many people fell in love with the Saint Peter’s Peacocks because that is one of the coolest birds out there.
For this year’s tournament, there are a lot of great options for teams bringing the vibes. You got the return of McNeese State and equipment manager Amir “Aura” Khan, who went viral last year for the energy he brought off the court.
When it comes to jerseys, there are a lot of good options to pick from. North Carolina’s “Carolina Blue” makes for some of the best-looking threads out there, and the UC San Diego Tritons make a case for the best name out there.
Pick em
Regardless of how you pick your bracket, it’s likely that it will get crushed within the first few games, whether you have basketball knowledge or not.
So, whether you are an expert or don’t know how many points a 3-pointer scores (there might be some bigger problems if that’s the case), fill out a bracket because you never know when you’ll be the one in 9.2 quintillion.
Picture by NCAA.