The Psychology Behind A Bracket That You'll Never Understand
It's a stereotype, which means it's not really accurate, but there is a long-running gag that women will just pick their bracket randomly. It is virtually impossible to pick a perfect bracket. No one's ever done it. No one's ever even made it fully into the Sweet 16 unscathed.
In 2019, one man had every pick right until the Sweet 16, but then things fell apart. He picked 49 games correctly in a row, an unfathomable record. And yet, he's just like the rest of us. He's never gotten it right.
Those picks were made with a lot of logic, reasoning, statistical analysis, and insight. Plenty of people really try to get into it and determine who will win based on sports knowledge. As the stereotype goes, not women, and you'll never quite get it.
Women picking a March Madness bracket is something else
Everyone gets involved in March Madness. Those who know nothing about the sport of college basketball do, too. Somewhere between 60 million and 100 million brackets get filled out every single year. Women are doing a ton of those, as roughly 40% of all people who fill out a bracket are female.
Men might try to use some sort of formula, like NET rating or KenPom metrics. It never works. It's honestly more fun to do it in the stereotypical woman's method. Just have fun with it, and make the picks based on whatever you like.
What could that be? It could be literally anything. You could pick based on the best colors, in which case the Final Four would probably be North Carolina, Northern Iowa, Arkansas, and Kentucky. That would already be busted (thanks, UNC), but it would've been a fun bracket to fill out.
Additionally, it could be the coolest mascot, in which case, the Final Four would be even wilder. Miami (Ohio) Redhawks, Kennesaw State Owls, High Point Panthers, and Michigan State Spartans. Can you imagine how insane that would be? Yet, you'd have a great time making those picks, even if they went against your instinct to pick the better teams.
More methods of madness
Another option is where you'd like to vacation. Florida, UCLA, Hawaii, and Santa Clara would be popular picks to make it out of their bracket regions. Miami (Florida), South Florida, and UCF might be your picks, too.
What if you made your choices based on schools you're not quite sure where they're located? Kennesaw State, McNeese, St. John's, Furman, Prairie View A&M, Troy, UMBC, Lehigh, Wright State, and Hofstra would make the cut. That'd be hard to pick once you got down to the Elite Eight and all the teams are places you couldn't even guess about.
Furthermore, you could even take a page from your lady's book and make picks based on the cutest players. I won't reveal my picks for that one here. We don't kiss and tell, but I'd have a hard time picking between Illinois and Michigan. We'll just leave it at that.
These are just a few of the seemingly silly methods that some women (we have to reiterate that it's not all) employ when trying to fill out their brackets. You could take a page out of their book and try these methods, but we're guessing this is part of a psychology that men just wouldn't understand.
I myself am drawn to making picks based on what I know (even if I know deep down that I don't know anything about these schools). It gets at a base psychological need to at least try to make educated picks, although it's certainly fun to cut loose and pick like it doesn't matter. Because it doesn't.
