10 steps to winning your March Madness pool

Filling out a March Madness bracket can be intimidating. Everywhere you look this week, fans and pundits will be pontificating about which teams will advance past the opening weekend, which will make the Final Four and which have no chance. Some of it will be good advice, but most of it is noise, distracting you from the real wisdom needed to fill out a bracket that has a fighting chance. That’s why I created this guide to help you maximize your pool entry.

To build an easy strategy, we’re going to incorporate historical trends, make some educated guesses based on analytics and lean on betting markets to point us in the right direction. Some of these tips may be new to you, but rest assured this is the correct path to take.

• Don’t start filling out your bracket with Round 1; start with the Elite Eight or Final Four: Most people sit down with a bracket, start choosing the round-of-64 winners and go round by round until they have a national champion. A more lucrative approach is to first choose your teams advancing to either the Elite Eight or Final Four and then work backward before selecting your national champion.

Why? Because according to a March 2020 study in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports (“Models for generating NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket pools”), bracket generators that start by selecting the teams that reach the Elite Eight or Final Four tend to outperform generators that start with the round of 64 or the national title game. This approach also reduces the number of decisions you need to make in the earlier rounds, saving you time for more productive things like telling a friend or two to subscribe to The Washington Post.

• Look for value in the Elite Eight: While higher seeds are generally more talented, the public tends to advance those higher seeds – teams on the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 lines – to the Elite Eight at too high of a rate compared to how often those squads actually advance that far. As a result, most people are too shy about advancing the lower seeds, scared about taking risks that won’t pay off. Don’t make that mistake.

Specifically, look for highly rated teams in analyst Ken Pomeroy’s rankings that have been under-seeded in the tournament. You could also target lower-seeded teams that have a high consensus rating relative to the field, using analyst Ken Massey’s aggregation of dozens of rating methods.

One team that jumps out this season is Gonzaga, the No. 8 seed in the Midwest Region. The Bulldogs rank ninth in Pomeroy’s ratings, similar to the rankings for most of the No. 2 and No. 3 seeds, and have the ninth-most efficient offense in the country. They start with No. 9 Georgia and would likely need to beat No. 1 seed Houston in the second round, but if that happens, you’ll gain ground on almost everyone in your pools. Other lower seeds that fare well in Pomeroy’s rankings include No. 7 seeds Kansas and St. Mary’s and No. 8 seed Louisville.

• Be selective picking upsets: We will define an upset as one in which the winning team is at least three seeds worse than its opponent. Since 2011, when the men’s field expanded to 68 teams, there have been, on average, 14 of these upsets per tournament, with half occurring in the first round.

So how do you decide which teams are capable of busting brackets? If you are comfortable with sports betting, check out the point spreads for each individual game and find lower-seeded teams that are either small underdogs or favored outright. Some of those this season include West Region No. 12 seed Colorado State, which is favored against No. 5 Memphis, and South Region No. 12 seed UC San Diego, a narrow underdog against No. 5 Michigan.

You could also check out the consensus rankings and make decisions accordingly. Higher-rated teams have historically won approximately 67 % of the time, giving you a good benchmark for potential “upsets” to target.

• Don’t rely on coaches with flash-in-the-pan tournament records: Years ago, analyst Peter Tiernan created a classification system for NCAA basketball coaches based on how many tournaments they qualified for and the number of Elite Eights they advanced to. At the time, rookie coaches and those Tiernan called “snakebit” – more than five tournament trips with no Elite Eight runs – were among the worst performing coaches relative to their teams’ seeding. However, the worst performing coaches are now flashes-in-the-pan, those with more than five trips to the Big Dance but only one Elite Eight run.

Coaches in this underperforming group include Brad Brownell (Clemson), Brad Underwood (Illinois), Buzz Williams (Texas A&M), Greg McDermott (Creighton), Mick Cronin (UCLA), Nate Oats (Alabama) and Shaka Smart (Marquette). All of those teams but Creighton is at least a No. 7 seed this year.

The coaches who should outperform their seed’s average performance, based on Tiernan’s classifications and historical data, include Connecticut’s Dan Hurley (a coach in the Destined category) and a number of coaches classified as prodigies, such as Brian Dutcher (San Diego State), Chris Beard (Mississippi), Dusty May (Michigan), Jon Scheyer (Duke), Mike White (Georgia) and Porter Moser (Oklahoma).

• The SEC is overrated and likely due for a downturn: The SEC was the best performing conference of the season, with its teams rated 19 points better than their opponents as a conference, per Sports Reference’s Simple Rating System. Pomeroy’s rating system agrees, estimating an average team from the conference scores 22 net points more per 100 possessions than an average team in Division I. That is again tops among conferences, and the SEC was thus rewarded with 14 tournament berths, the most ever for a single conference.

We’ve seen this kind of conference domination before. In 1997, for example, the ACC was the best conference in the country. However, conference tournament champion North Carolina lost in the Final Four, regular season champion Duke was upset in the second round and four other ACC teams – Wake Forest, Clemson, Maryland and Virginia – failed to make it past the Sweet 16. Last year, it was the Big 12 dominating the conference landscape, but just two of its eight tournament teams, Houston and Iowa State, reached the Sweet 16.

In fact, according to Pomeroy’s research, “among power conferences, the better the league, the more likely their rating will drop during the tournament.”

That means you should probably fade some of the SEC teams in this year’s tournament, possibly including East Region No. 2 seed Alabama, Midwest No. 3 Kentucky, South No. 4 Texas A&M, and No. 6 Mississippi, West No. 6 Missouri and East No. 8 Mississippi State.

• Believe in at least one ‘First Four’ team: Four at-large teams will begin the tournament with “First Four” games on Tuesday and Wednesday. The winners won’t all succeed, but from 2011 to 2024, only once (in 2019) has an at-large First Four team failed to win a game in the round of 64. According to various ratings, the best First Four team this year is No. 11 seed North Carolina, which faces fellow No. 11 San Diego State on Tuesday, with the winner facing No. 6 seed Mississippi.

The Tar Heels lost to No. 1 Duke in the semifinals of the ACC tournament after a heartbreaking lane violation, but finished 36th in the NET rankings – based on game results, efficiency metrics, strength of schedule and quality wins – and 33rd in Pomeroy’s rankings, which adjust offensive and defensive efficiency for strength of schedule. Teams within a few spots of North Carolina’s Pomeroy’s rating include No. 5 seed Oregon, No. 8 seed Mississippi State and No. 9 seed Georgia.

• Favor teams that did well in conference tournaments: From 1999 to 2010, eight out of 12 national champions previously won their conference tournaments. In the 13 tournaments since, just five conference champions won the national championship.

However, every national championship-winning team since 1985 – with the exception of UCLA in 1995 and Arizona in 1997, neither of which had a conference tournament – has lasted at least to the semifinal round of its conference tournament. So plan on avoiding teams that made an early exit, at least for your national title pick. This year, such teams include No. 3 seed Iowa State, No. 3 Kentucky, No. 4 Purdue, and No. 4 Texas A&M.

• Focus on the statistics that matter: There were thousands of games this season, producing countless statistics that fans will use to decide which teams to favor. Most of them are irrelevant. Focus on the essentials of shooting, rebounding, creating turnovers and getting to the free throw line, also known as the four factors for offense and defense.

For upset candidates, generating turnovers might be the most important statistic. Turnovers provide less talented teams with the extra possessions that are crucial to pulling off a March upset. Some of the best ball-hawking teams that are lower-seeded teams in this tournament include No. 12 seed UC San Diego, No. 11 Drake and No. 12 McNeese State.

• Don’t just guess at the tiebreaker total: The tiebreaker most often used in bracket contests – total points scored in the championship game – is often treated as an afterthought. It doesn’t have to be.

Since 1985, when the men’s tournament expanded to 64 teams, the national title game has averaged 145 total points when decided in regulation. The four overtime games in that span averaged 157 total points. The most total points scored in regulation was in 1990, when UNLV beat Duke, 103-73 (176). The fewest total points came in 2011, when Connecticut beat Butler, 53-41 (94).

How many points you choose should be influenced by which teams you have in the final. Here’s a quick list of some of the most frequent matchups in the Elite Eight and beyond and the average total points scored in those contests since 2011 – but look at the scoring averages of your particular chosen teams. I will have a guide to picking the tiebreaker later this week.

• Know how to spot a potential championship team: Success leaves clues, and we have a lot of data on how an eventual championship team usually performs leading up to the tournament. Since the field expanded to 68 teams in 2011, for example, every national champion except two – No. 7 seed Connecticut in 2014 and Connecticut again as a No. 4 seed in 2024 – was a No. 1, 2 or 3 seed. Since 1985, when the field expanded to 64 teams, all but five of the 38 winners were a No. 1, 2 or 3 seed and 25 of the 39 (64 percent) were No. 1 seeds.

And all but four of the past 20 winners have had their individual Simple Rating System, a schedule-adjusted margin of victory rating that is expressed in points per game, rank in the top four nationally. The top four teams in SRS this year are also the No. 1 seeds in the tournament, Duke, Auburn, Houston and Florida.