March is just a bit more Mad this year as the NCAA men’s basketball tournament returns after a one-year, virus-induced hiatus.
This annual Betting Bacchanalia, spiced with a bit of Wrong Way Corrigan Day (July 17, you can look it up!) is a moment of rampant shared enthusiasm. After a year of going cold turkey without a tournament, one can feel the fervor for this year’s triumphant return.
This brings the sort of unity so many politicians profess to desire, but do not promote with their actions.
Unlike what those hypocrites actually achieve, filling out brackets for betting pools consumes and unites people of every race, creed, sex or religion. Many of the people you know will have a bracket they follow slavishly to track their prowess at picking winners.
Forget that the men’s basketball tournament generates almost all the betting interest and the women’s tournament slogs along in veritable seclusion. Even social justice warriors are willing to ignore that and put their cause on hold for a shot at bracket nirvana.
In many ways this is like the Super Bowl in that it lures in novices who ordinarily would not consider betting on sports, but somehow think they now can compete with the sharks based on the sheer numbers of the uninitiated participating.
A word of advice: If you are a serious gambler, open an online account at one of the betting sites and pick individual games, or even do some parlays or future bets.
In that way your expertise might be rewarded.
Picking entire brackets correctly tends to be an inverse function of in-depth knowledge.
I’ve won a couple of small bracket contests in the past at work, but more often than not I’ve merely donated my money.
Here is what I’ve learned along the way.
No matter how much you think you know about college men’s basketball, your bracket is likely to be won by someone making their picks based on the color of the team uniforms, the school mascot, or the name of the school, particularly ones such as Gonzaga or Creighton, Baylor or Duke that give no clue to geographic location, as opposed to Alabama, Michigan, Illinois and the like.
Don’t pick No. 16 seeds to upset No. 1 seeds in the first round. Yes, it’s happened once, UMBC over Virginia in 2018, thereby wrecking my brackets and millions of others. But the overall edge for No. 1 seeds is about 140-1. You don’t want to buck those odds.
If you can’t help yourself, pick a No 15 seed to upset a No. 2 seed. That has happened eight times in tournament history, which means while such picks remain incredible longshots, they still have eight times the historical chance of happening as No. 16 upsetting No. 1.
The darling upset pick, the one that will get a knowing nod of approval from bracketologists, is to pick one or more No. 12 seeds to take out a No. 5 seed in the first round. At least here you have a reasonable chance at success. Five times in the past 40 years at least three No. 12 seeds have won in the same tournament year. Over that same 40-year span, there have been just five years when there wasn’t a No. 12 upset of a No. 5 seed.
Taking favored Gonzaga to win the NCAA championship is an even greater longshot than picking a No. 12-No. 5 upset or two. The Zags are 26-0 coming into the tournament, seeking to become the first unbeaten champion since Indiana went 32-0 in 1975-76. Be doubly scared because so many in the college hoops cognoscenti, ranging from Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim to ESPN guru Dick Vitale, are taking Gonzaga to win it all.
Bonus reason not to take Gonzaga in these cancel culture, anti-establishment times: It is a private Catholic school in Spokane, Washington, whose colors are red, white and blue!
Sam Ross Jr's site 