Are you considering playing in a March Madness NCAAB office pool this year? If so, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will give you some perspective on the bracket challenge and the hysteria that it causes across the nation, present some interesting statistics from past tournaments, present some common pitfalls that you should avoid, and list some steps to take to give yourself the best chance to win your pool.

March MADNESS!!

The purpose of the Men’s College Basketball Post-Season, dubbed “March Madness”, isn’t about finding out who the best team in the nation is. This is corporate America we’re talking about. March Madness is a brilliantly planned mechanism that makes a sport our country doesn’t care about for 95% of the season profitable to the tune of $5 billion dollars a year and 11.3 million viewers nationwide.

If you think March Madness was made for basketball fans, you’ve been fooled. March Madness is for the gamblers. Americans don’t tune in necessarily to see the best games, but instead hope for most insane, unlikely results that line up with their unique brackets. Just look at Las Vegas on the first weekend of the tournament, the lines are around the lobby to make a wager, rooms are booked months out, and there are all day viewing parties all over the place! Las Vegas is the place to be for March Madness.

The gambling spirit achieved is done by convincing everyone that each team has a real chance. This is based on a stretched truth – although #15 seeds take down #2 seeds in the first round all the time, the lowest seed to ever win the whole thing was an eight-seeded Villanova.

The point here is to not fall for the extravagance that is March Madness, there will be upsets, but in the end – the most dominant teams will be left.

No Such Thing as Perfection

The first thing that you need to remember is that perfection is impossible, even with so-called “expert knowledge”. The talking heads from ESPN, CBS, and Sports Illustrated are no better at predicting winners and filling out brackets than the average person playing in a NCAAB office pool.

Warren Buffet once offered $1 billion to anyone who picked a perfect bracket. No one ever came up with anything even close that year. The chances of doing this are over 1 in 120 billion, at least. Some people argue that the real number is over a few trillion, either way – you see the point. Just for fun, we’ve provided a list of things more likely to happen to you that picking the perfect NCAAB Championship Bracket:

The objective of the NCAAB office pool is to bring colleagues closer together, not to pick a perfect bracket. Don’t listen to the experts and get a big head, or you could end up buying lunch for someone in your office who picked off the names of university mascots.

Common NCAAB Office Pool Mistakes to Avoid

Placing Too Much Confidence on Hot Streaks

This is called a “hot hand fallacy”, which most NCAAB office pool, or bracket challenge participants fall victim to. This fallacy is the belief that because a certain player or team is on a good run, or hot streak, that they will continue the run into the next game. There is very little evidence that recent success in a skill-based activity guarantees future success. The opposite is also true here. just because a team or player comes in to the tournament on a cold streak, doesn’t mean that this level of play will continue.

You should look at a team’s full season when filling out your NCAAB office pool, not just recent success or failure.

Relying on a Single Expert

We touched on this point earlier, following experts isn’t a good strategy to follow, and this is especially true if you only follow one expert. If you want to take expert opinion into account, look for qualified experts who use an objective approach. One such expert with a popular objective approach is Nate Silver, who writes for ESPN’s “FiveThirtyEight” blog.

An expert may be hot one year, but fall flat on their face the next. They are just like any average bracket participant and will regress to the mean of the global knowledge pool over time.

Giving Up Too Early

Most March Madness Office Bracket Pools are scored in such a way that make early round win counts very insignificant. Too many players throw in the towel after the first two days if they didn’t pick 70% or better, this is simply the wrong thing to do. It’s April that matters more, not how the first few days of the tournament in March go.

Typical Points Per Correct Pick by Round:

As you can see, picking the winner of the National Championship is worth the same amount of points as picking every game of the first round correctly in most NCAAB office pools.

It is highly unlikely that all four #1 seeds will make the Final Four, but statistically – you will do yourself a favor by picking at least two #1 seeds and two #2 seeds in your pool and maybe three #1’s. The key is to focus on how many of your Final Four teams are still alive, not how many losses you took early in the tournament.

Percentage of Seeds in the Final Four Since 2011:

Objective Approach to Winning NCAAB Office Pools

Quick and Easy NCAAB Office Pool Strategy

1. Look at each region (North, South, East, West) of the tournament as a sub-tournament of sixteen teams
2. Review several experts and statistician’s rankings
   1. Pomeroy Rankings – http://kenpom.com/
   2. Sagarin Rankings – http://www.usatoday.com/sports/ncaab/sagarin/
   3. Davidson University Rankings – http://marchmathness.davidson.edu/cgi/ranking_massey.cgi
   4. Nate Silver – https://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/nate-silver/
3. Refer to the chart below to see how different seeds have fared against each other over a decade look at past tournaments vs. the actual odds of the lower seed winning, when doing the math
4. Combine all the information and fill in each region backwards, from the Final Four to the First Round, keeping in mind to pick at least two #1 seeds to win their region
5. Look at the Final Four as a separate tournament, use the entire season when picking – along with the information obtained from the sources above

By Chris Sharp, Certified 12-Time Veteran of Las Vegas March Madness and Sports Wagering