Bracket Tips: Help Make the ‘Perfect Bracket’
It’s March Madness time, and you have just a few days to get your bracket as perfect as possible. Whether you’re doing brackets for fun or cash, you’re going to want to make the best bracket possible going into the NCAA tourney. While it’s literally impossible to craft the perfect bracket, or for all practical purposes impossible, there are some things you can do to help give your bracket an edge. Here are some bracket tips, so your bracket doesn’t tank this year.
Bracket Tips for Crafting a Better Bracket
Start your bracket with the Elite Eight or Final Four
This is a tip from the Washington Post. “We start with the teams we think will reach the Elite Eight or the Final Four and work backward to reduce the number of decisions we need to make,” staff writer Neil Greenberg says. He cites a March 2020 study in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports (“Models for generating NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket pools”) and says that bracket generators that begin picking teams at the Elite Eight or Final Four “tend to outperform generators that start with the round of 64 or the national champion.”
Carefully pick upsets
There will always be upsets. But, don’t go too crazy picking the No. 16 seed to beat the No. 1 in all cases or anything. Pick some upsets that you really think are possible, but the majority of your bracket shouldn’t be all upsets. The most common upsets are 10-7, according to the NCAA.
Don’t pick high seeds to lose early
This goes along with the upsets. Yahoo! Sports urges you not to kill off all your No. 1 seeds early. Who would do this? I guess someone who really, really loves the underdog. I love the underdog, too. But, I want to win my bracket, so there’s no way I’m going to take down UConn or Purdue in the first round. I would love to hear your picks. Reach out here.
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