How to Fill Out a March Madness Bracket When You Know Nothing About Basketball
Are your friends bombarding your inbox with demands for your March Madness bracket? Is your boss stopping by your desk to thump you on the back and ask you who you think will make it to the Final Four? Do you like healthy competition, but you don’t know a thing about layups?
If so, you’re one of millions of Americans who don’t care about college basketball and are forced to make guesses about who will win the tournament that takes over bar TVs for a few weeks. Weeks that feel like they last 10,000 years.
Knowing nothing and having to fill out a bracket can be tough. Here are five strategies you can use, especially if you’re not into analyzing which team has a higher probability of making it rain threes. These techniques should help you decide who’s going to take home the gold—or whatever—when it comes down to the final buzzer.
STRATEGY 1: Make up fake team names based on the acronyms, and then decide who wins based on your own matchups.
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Here’s an in-depth look at what this strategy would look like for the first round of games being played in Pittsburgh.Click for a full-size image.
BUT vs. TEX translates to: The Malcolm Butlers vs. The Text Books
Winner: The Malcolm Butlers, no contest. If he could end Super Bowl XLIX with an interception like that, think what a whole team of him could do for a college basketball program. This means that Butler University (not as great a name as The Malcolm Butlers—someone should start a Change.org petition) would advance in your real bracket.
ND vs. NE translates to: The Nerds vs. The Nepotisms
Winner: The Nepotisms. Because nepotism usually wins, no matter what you say about your co-worker Susie’s niece, who can’t figure out a spreadsheet to save her life. But in basketball terms, this means Northeastern advances in your bracket.
STRATEGY 2: Base your picks on the teams’ appearances.
This is what everybody does, even if they’re all like, “Wisconsin will win because of their Swing Offense approach.’’ Don’t believe them; the real reason they picked Wisconsin is because they think the red and white uniforms are bold and assertive.
The uniform approach takes several forms. If you go matchup by matchup, just choose the uniform you like best (in which case, Tennessee should win the whole tournament if you have any fashion sense whatsoever).
You can also get fancy with it, though. Every team with blue uniforms, for example, automatically gets a win, or any team whose shorts hit above the knee (are there any of those left, anymore? Where have you gone, Larry Bird?) are automatically losers.
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You can also judge teams based on smiles. Do the players from BYU have better grins than the Xavier players? Go with BYU, then. Do you like the sneakers that MSU wears and hate GSU’s kicks? MSU it is!
Or just go for which team has better looking players in general.
STRATEGY 3: Pit the mascots against each other, and decide who would win a fight that takes place in a rowboat.
Parts of this strategy have been done before. A straight forward fight on land between the Duke Blue Devils and the Lehigh Mountain Hawks was a no-brainer when they went head to head in Slate’s article from 2012. The Blue Devils would either shoot down the hawks or just trap them in cages and kill them. Don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
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But introduce a rowboat into the equation, and you turn the whole thing on its head. Would the Blue Devils be able to stand up without falling out of the boat? Probably not, and you couldn’t fit a whole team of them in a dinghy, anyway. So that puts them at a disadvantage, and coupled with the fact that hawks can fly and don’t need a dumb boat anyway, you’ve got a clear winner.
STRATEGY 4: Trust the math.
Sports analytics are a thing, and if you’re into numbers and stuff, you should just listen to what they’re telling you. And “what they’re telling you’’ really means “what Nate Silver’s telling you.’’ To do that, just check this out, and then copy his bracket.
STRATEGY 5: Eenie-meenie-miney-mo.
Pretty self-explanatory.
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