Why I Know More About College Basketball Than You
Listed in: BasketballIt wasn't just the Gators who went back-to-back yesterday. Your favorite editor-in-chief nailed down the title for the second consecutive year, buoyed by a perfect Final Four and a correct championship game. I was so accurate this year I almost nailed the final score (I had Florida winning 84-77).
Last year, I won the Sportszilla pool, but that was more because I managed to get fewer things wrong. No one picked Florida, so having UCLA in the championship game was good enough to lock up first place for me.
Not so this year. It started with my quest to get a better understanding of how to make picks. To do so, I looked at the results of each tournament since the NCAA expanded to 64 teams (in 1985). From there, I figured out what percent of the time a given seed won a game in a given round. The results can be found here, but I'll briefly summarize: picking upsets is bad for business. Sure, it's fun to say you were the only one in your pool who picked that 14-seed to win, but if the purpose of entering the pool is to win it, picking upsets is wasteful. My bracket was fairly chalk-heavy, and while picking next to no early upsets meant I didn't have anything to brag about, it also put me in first place almost from Day One.
But the real truth is, before the tournament even started I knew I was going to pick Florida. I knew that if they played at their highest level they would be next to unbeatable. Once I saw that Ohio State was in the other half of the bracket, I knew what my championship game was going to look like. From there, it was a matter of filling out the rest of the Final Four. I wasn't going to pick all the first seeds to advance, and both UCLA and Georgetown jumped out at me: UCLA of course had proven their talent level last season, while Georgetown was fortunate enough to be grouped with the weakest (because of inexperience) #1 seed, North Carolina.
With that foundation in place, the rest of the bracket became fairly simple. I didn't get everything right, but I also didn't put myself in a situation where I had to go way against the odds in order to be right: nothing but top-four seeds made my Elite 8. Sure, I was wrong about Texas A&M and Texas (damn that state!), but neither miss cost me much.
In short, I took down the pool for the second straight year. If I manage the three-peat (don't worry Riley, your royalty check is on the way), I may very well have to retire from the pool. But even if I don't, I'm happy to go down as the single greatest dynasty in Sportszilla history.
