Does Anyone Actually Have a Clue About Filling Out Their Brackets?
March Madness is officially here, which means it's time to fill out those brackets. It's a time-honored, yearly tradition. Everyone agrees to make wild predictions on 63 total basketball games, getting upset when they inevitably get it wrong. It has become such a phenomenon in pop culture that even non-sports fans fill out a few brackets. Does anyone know what they're doing, though?
More data doesn't mean a sure pick
Advanced analytics have changed sports. Some people complain, wishing that sports could be a little simpler, like they used to be. What's the deal with true shooting percentage? Wasn't regular old field-goal percentage good enough?
More data is usually good, and it usually leads to better decisions. We are a whole lot smarter about finding good players and good teams across all sports now. That hasn't really translated to March Madness brackets. As much as we've evolved, we still can't make heads or tails of the bracket in front of us.
The odds of getting it all right are 1 in 9.2 quintillion, which is nigh impossible. No one has ever done it. That isn't surprising, and it doesn't mean everyone who's filled out brackets is plain stupid. But going further, the numbers make it seem like no one really knows a thing.
Just predicting the Final Four, which is literally just four teams that are usually among the best in the sport, is insanely hard. Millions and millions of brackets are filled out online every single year. Only hundreds ever get those four teams right.
Less than 1% of all brackets even pick the right champion. The odds there are pretty good, actually. Technically, there are 64 pickable options, so the odds are 1-64. Nobody lower than an eight seed has ever won the tournament, though, so that essentially cuts the odds in half, and yet, hardly anyone can figure it out.
No one really knows anything about the March Madness brackets
We have all the data possible, and experts do suggest that this data, when used well and thoroughly in making bracket picks, can lower the odds of a perfect bracket to 1 in 120 billion. That's still virtually impossible. Even those in the know don't know anything.
NET rating is a somewhat new team metric that essentially ranks all the teams. Having a high net rating means you stand a good chance of winning. There are even other metrics that help. No champion has ever had worse than a top-25 offense and top-40 defense, so that restricts the field.
That only leaves a handful of teams that can possibly win it all, and still, no one can guess it right. In chart form, this has become known as the Trapezoid of Excellence. Basically, if a team scores well in offensive and defensive metrics, they'll land in a certain region when it's graphed out. Only those teams can win the title.
BPI, the Quad system, and so many other things help separate contenders from pretenders. It has literally never been easier to pick these games, and no one ever gets them right. Anything can happen in sports, especially basketball.
While some schools absolutely do not have good players, these are all basketball players. They're mostly all capable of having good nights. The inverse is true, even for the best players like Cam Boozer or AJ Dybantsa. They can have bad nights, and their low-ranked opponents can get hot. It happens all the time.
Sports are hard to predict, even when we have impossible levels of data to help those predictions. It's part of the fun. No one knows anything, but we all pretend we do. We make our brackets every year, like this is the time we'll get most of it right. It's not. It never is.
