Bracketology 101: Don’t Go With The Experts, Use Your Own Style

(reposted from March 2013)

Pick Your Own Style for a Bracketbusting NCAA Tournament

Bracketology is becoming almost an art. There so so many different ways to choose your Brackets for March Madness, although in going through the archives the one from the Wall Street Journal is probably the most ingenious I’ve seen.

The Wall Street Journal Vegetable Bracket: Midwest Region

There are of course other ways to choose who moves through to the Final Four, you could use the ‘let my wife choose her favorite mascots’ approach. This year my wife has Bulldogs vs Bulldogs for the NCAA Championship. You could be like Andy Wheeler from CBS Philly and choose several different ways, including my favorite, The Moron. An article from several years ago offers up ‘How to Choose a Bracket Like a Girl’.  AddictedtoQuack created a rating system for picks and here’s a look at what would happen if the teams were to meet on the football field. This year there is a new metric according to the folks at AddictedtoQuack.

However you choose to pick your teams – in some cases the close your eyes and point method may work best, you have to have at least some knowledge of what your doing, or not. It’s up to you.

Fansided’s look at the Midwest Bracket

To further assist in your Bracketology  every team always has a shot…at least on paper. Your shot at a perfect bracket…is not very good.

From Fansided, some interesting stats…

There are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible brackets (9.2 quintillion)
That’s the number nine follow by eighteen zeros!
That’s ONE MILLION times bigger than 9 TRILLION!

Some examples of just how big this number is:

• If everyone on the planet each randomly filled out a bracket, the odds would be over ONE BILLION to 1 against any person having a perfect bracket.
• If one bracket per second was filled out, it would take 292 BILLION years to fill out all possible brackets (that’s 20 times longer than the universe has existed).
• If all the people on earth filled out one bracket per second, it would take over 43 years to fill out every possible bracket.
• If all possible brackets were stacked on top of each other (on standard paper), the pile would reach from the moon and back over 1.1 million times.
• All possible brackets (on standard paper) would weigh 90,000 times more than every man, women, and child on earth combined.
• Even if a person had a 90% chance of winning each game he picked, his odds would still be 763 to 1 against picking a perfect bracket.

68 vs. 64 teams:

The calculations above assume a 64 team bracket – if expanded to consider 68 teams, multiple the figures by 4.

so if you are thinking of having a perfect bracket….and I know your an optimist, Good Luck.

There’s still time to join in the AutzenZoo/SI Bracket Challege. Click here to sign up.

Fansided and AutzenZoo are also giving you the chance at some awesome prizes during March Madness

Sites to Follow the Madness

NCAA Tournament on Twitter

 Must-Follow Twitter Accounts for Each of the 68 NCAA Tournament Teams -Athlon Sports

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