How do you pick the perfect March Madness bracket? Whether you’re a diehard sports fan or a person who has never watched basketball in their life, we’ve all asked the question before. However, by looking at the stats and all the possibilities, the madness brings your chances of getting it all right to about 1 in 9.2 quintillion. You have better odds to pick one specific grain of rice out of all the grains of rice ever harvested in human history than to pick a perfect bracket. Obviously, we are still going to try to be the first one, so let’s dive into the facts on how to pick your national champion bracket. Here are the numbers to help you narrow down the options to pick a winner on the men’s side of March Madness.
Every national champion since 2002 was a top 21 team in offensive efficiency and top 37 team in defensive efficiency. Efficiency is a state that keeps track of how many points are scored and scored against every 100 possessions. Out of the 68 teams in the tournament, we already have narrowed it down to 26 teams based on this statistic. Another unique statistic is that all March Madness winners since 2002 have never lost the first game of their conference championship tournament, which narrows down the field to 23 teams.
Many teams, when they get a new head coach, have high hopes of winning a national title. However, only coach Tubby Smith, who coached Kentucky in his first year as head coach, took them to a national championship. With that being said, it’s very unlikely that a first year head coach for a team will bring their team to a title leaving us with only 20 teams that have a serious chance of winning.
Everyone loves a good Cinderella story, but in reality, they typically have a good run that ends before the national championship. The stats back that up with the fact of no team higher than an eight seed in the tournament has made the national championship. Another fun fact is that no national champion has ever come from a league with less than three teams in the tournament from their league. This gets rid of two more teams in Gonzaga and St. Marys.
Top two seeds are usually the best teams to pick. Many people love Michigan State and predict they’ll go all the way this year, but the stats disagree. Michigan State was an unranked team in the Associated Press (AP) poll, and no team that was unranked in the preseason and became a top two seed in the tournament has ever made the final four. Sorry Michigan State fans, but try again next year. The last random statistic to narrow our choices down is that no team that was ranked outside the top 12 in the week six AP poll has ever won a national championship.
With all that being said, we have simply narrowed the field down from 68 teams to 12 possible champions. That’s not too bad if you ask me. You are left with Duke, Auburn, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Iowa State, Gonzaga, Kansas, Marquette, Oregon, Arizona and Texas Tech. In my opinion, I believe that the top four teams to pick to win would be Auburn, Florida, Alabama and Arizona. These four teams have shown consistency and dominance all through the season and are primed to make a deep run with their veteran presence.
I was curious though what Artificial Intelligence was predicting. Chat GPT chose Purdue to win the national championship, which based on our predictions with stats makes no sense. This is because no matter what you ask, Chat GPT does not have a prediction for this year’s March Madness due to it having an outdated dataset.
So follow my guide to making your predictions this year. The madness begins Thursday March 20 at 12:15 p.m., so get those brackets cooking, and hopefully this is the year you make that perfect bracket.
