The Madness Begins: Guide to Win Your March Madness Pool

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

If you're a sports fan, that is.

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The NCAA begins its yearly basketball championship tournament, AKA March Madness, Thursday. Yes, there are the "First Four" matchups taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, but the tournament everyone cares about starts Thursday.

That's because the real fun of the tournament is creating your own bracket and predicting the big winner! Unfortunately, local fans of college basketball only have Gonzaga to root for - there won't be a Ted Mosby and Marshall Eriksen bracket predicting Washington State to win it at all, nor will the Huskies be featured in this year's tournament after a stinker of a season where they didn't even make their conference tournament.

Whether you're a seasoned bracket veteran, or you're entering your work's bracket pool for the first time, here's an overlook and guide of how to find those upsets, the favorites, the darkhorses, and how to win it all.

What's the Deal with Upsets?

The best part of the tournament - the small mid-major school upsetting an NCAA Basketball Blue Blood. It will happen! You want to be careful, though.

For the record - the NCAA only defines an upset as a team five seeds or more worse off than the team they are beating. So, a 10-seed defeating a 7-seed or an 8-seed beating a 9-seed doesn't really count. You're looking for the coveted 14-seed taking down a 3-seed or, maybe, and it has only happened a few times, the 16-seed taking down a 1-seed.

A big mistake beginners make involves picking too many low seeds (think 10-16 seeds) to make it deep into the tournament.

According to the NCAA, an average of eight-and-a-half upsets occur each year. The fewest amount of upsets occured in 2007, when only three games ended with lower seeds beating higher ranked teams. The most upsets to ever occur in one tournament came in 2021 with 14. There have also been at least 10 upsets in 15 of the past 39 seasons (approximately 39 percent of the time).

Nerding Out Over Metrics

You might wonder: If teams playing at higher-rated conferences carry more value, then how do you measure which lower-rated conference teams (think Gonzaga) compare to those teams?

There are a few ways to think about this. The first is Rating Percentage Index, or RPI.

The Selection Committee uses RPI to determine which teams will make it into the tournament based on a whole bunch of stats and figures we won't get into here. Many swear RPI is the way to predict whether a team wins or loses.

Then there's the basis of going off wins or losses, and head-to-head. This can be a good indicator, but if a pair of teams has never faced eachother in the regular season, you might as well end up flipping a coin.

Then there's the Ken Pomeroy rankings, or KenPom. Ken Pomeroy is a former weather man turned NCAA Basketball guru. His ranking system takes into account all the different metrics and compiles them into one ranking system, including NET Rating, Offensive and Defensive Efficiency, and even factors in luck. His rankings do not account for injuries, but overall, following these rankings should get you pretty far in your pool. For example, Gonzaga is No. 9 overall in the KenPom rankings - they go up against Georgia, ranked in the 30s, in round one Thursday afternoon. Even though Gonzaga is an 8-seed, Georgia is a 9-seed. You see how this can get hard?

What Does AI Think?

For fun, I asked ChatGPT to go game-by-game and create a bracket and predict the winner of each game as well as the winner of the whole tournament.

Skipping most of the tournament - it believes Gonzaga will make the Sweet 16, but falls to the winner of the last two NCAA Tournaments, the UConn Huskies.

In the Elite 8, ChatGPT believes Auburn defeats Arizona, Houston defeats Indiana, UConn defeats Florida, and Kansas defeats Oregon. In the Final Four, ChatGPT thinks Auburn bests Houston, and UConn defeats Kansas, which leaves UConn to defeat Auburn to complete a three-peat.

What Do I Think?

Why are you asking me? I've never even come close to a perfect bracket, and quite frankly, very few have. I know for sure UConn isn't going for a three-peat. Call me a hater, but Gonzaga usually falls short of expectations just about every year.

Even though there have been some 16-seeds defeating 1-seeds in recent history, and 2-seeds falling to unlikely 15-seeds, I highly doubt you'll see more than one of those occuring this year.

In the end, I just wanna see some good basketball. Let's enjoy the madness!