Every year, I go into March thinking, this will be the year I finally finish in first place in the NCAA Tournament bracket pool at work. I'm going up against some really smart people at 97.3 The Game who follow sports for a living but this is going to be my time to shine.
Then, by the time Friday's first-round games tip off, my bracket is already busted and sitting at the bottom of a paper shredder, and I'm left wondering what went wrong.
Luckily, there's plenty of easy advice to follow out there, and if you ignore the names, uniform colors, records, and all the other stuff that influences your decision-making process, you can focus strictly on the numbers and play the odds so that just maybe you'll earn bragging rights for the NCAA Tournament this year.
Some of the most obvious tips include picking at least three of the top seeds to make it to the Sweet 16, and probably two of them to make it to the Final Four. The NCAA champ has nearly 75% of the time in the past 20 years been a #1 seed. You also probably don't want to pick a bunch of 1-3 seeds to fall in the first round, and when it comes to picking your Cinderella, pick a team that crashes the boards and launches a ton of threes.
It all seems obvious, right? That's why I went back to the drawing board, hoping this time, I get more than five of the Sweet 16 teams right in our office pool.
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