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March Madness Picks Strategy: Myths Dispelled

March Madness is coming and there you are, watching ESPN, reading your local sports page, tuning in to your favorite sports radio station. What you read and hear is as predictable as rain in Seattle: dozens of "experts" (names withheld to protect the guilty) telling you foolproof ways to pick NCAA tournament winners.

This year, do yourself a favor. Have fun listening to them, but please don't base your bracket picks on what these so-called experts say. In fact, statistical analysis shows that the wisdom they preach is often quite wrong.

MYTH #1: Momentum coming into the NCAA Tournament is critical.

Here's a fun one. People love to talk about how a team's momentum coming into March Madness is such an important factor. Are they on a hot streak or not? After all, if a team has been slumping, you can't expect them suddenly to turn it around in the pressure-cooker environment of the NCAA tournament. Right?

Mathematically speaking, wrong. From 1996-2004, teams that lost at least 5 of their last 10 games going into the tournament actually slightly outperformed expectations. Based on the historical performance of similarly seeded teams, one would have expected these "cold" teams to have compiled a record of 63-75. But they went 66-72.

MYTH #2: Teams that have proven they can pull out close games make strong NCAA bracket picks.

A lot of people think that "cardiac" teams -- squads that have proven their ability to win close games and pull out victories under pressure -- demonstrate the tenacity and steel nerves that it takes to go deep in the NCAA tournament bracket. Here is the fact: from 1996-2004, teams that won more than two-thirds of their close games (defined as games decided by 5 points or less) during the regular season went 164-158 in the NCAA tournament.

That level of performance sounds decent enough, until you examine it in context. Based on the historical performance of similar NCAA tournament seeds, these cool-under-pressure teams should have won eight more games (172) than they actually did. Believe it. No matter what the sportscasters say, these teams have significantly underperformed expectations in the NCAA tournament.

We hope that these counterintuitive findings help open your eyes to how misleading some of the traditional approaches to evaluating March Madness teams can be. Even our analysis here isn't perfect, since we're the first ones to say that NCAA tournament seeds, especially in the middle range distant from the 1's and the 16's, are downright awful gauges of team performance.

In conclusion, if you want to make smart March Madness bracket picks, you need credible and objective data, and you need to analyze it in context. Shameless plug: that is exactly what BracketBrains offers.