March Madness Brackets 101

For the past couple of days some of you have taking time out of your day to fill out what is a strange looking piece of paper. It contains a lot of lines and names not familiar to many…..Winthrop, Maryland-Baltimore County, and Belmont to name a few. Belmont, isn’t that a race track? Yes it is but for the purpose of today’s discussion what I’m talking about is called a bracket sheet and you are now about to enter the world of “March Madness.”

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament opens today with 16 games being played at six sites around the country and another 16 games will be played tomorrow. Much like the Super Bowl part of the interest and excitement surrounding the tournament centers around office pools. Some of those pools will give you teams in a random selection while others are more complicated and require some work and a lot of luck. This is where I’m here to help you at the last moment as you need to turn in your bracket sheet before noon today and pick 63 winners, including a national champion.

The key to doing well in these pools is picking the right upsets because there will certainly be a few of them, especially during the first two rounds of the tournament when we get down to 16 teams. If you look at the name of the schools on your bracket sheet you’ll see a number next to them between 1-16. That’s their seed or rank in the region they are playing in and there are four of those….East, Midwest, South and West. The lower the number the more highly-regarded the team and you would not be alone if you picked up all the #1 seeds….North Carolina, Kansas, Memphis and UCLA to reach the national semifinals in San Antonio.

If you are looking at me as an expert I’m flattered but frankly my track record in picking the tournament is not very impressive although I did have Florida beating UCLA in the finals last year. I’m in a bunch of pools (for entertainment purposes only) and I like UCLA to win the whole thing with North Carolina, Wisconsin and Memphis also advancing to the Final Four.
However I also like Kansas, Louisville, Texas and Duke to do some damage.
As for first-round upsets how about Temple over Michigan State and possibly Villanova over Clemson or maybe even St. Joe’s to upset Oklahoma. Actually the biggest upset would be if I won a pool.