Making Better NCAA Bracket Picks:
10 Tips for Powerful Bracket Predictions
Making NCAA bracket picks can be a painstaking process filled with agony and self-doubt. As experienced bracket pickers know, filling out a bracket sheet certainly gives new meaning to the phrase March Madness!
At the end of the day, the success of your bracket predictions will depend on both skill and luck. You have no control over luck. However, with the right data and tools, you can acquire the skills to make smarter, more objective, and more informed bracket picks.
With that in mind, we have compiled a list of ten tips for making better bracket predictions. There is no perfect way to pick bracket winners, but following some simple, data driven guidelines can help you play the odds in an effective manner and outperform your bracket pool competitors in the long run.
Better Bracket Picks: 10 Things to Consider
1. Overall Performance
The best measure of overall team performance is not a team's record, NCAA Tournament seed, or RPI rating, but our NCAA basketball power rankings. Our proprietary power rankings incorporate oodles of relevant data: season game scores and win/loss, home/away/neutral site performance, margins of victory, performance in recent games, etc. In short, our power rankings provide an extremely sophisticated and objective measurement of how good a team really is. Remember to look at both the numerical rating and not just the ranking, as sometimes teams ranked several slots apart may actually have very similar ratings. It's the rating that counts.
2. Recent Play
Some NCAA Tournament teams were lousy in November and great in February. Other NCAA teams were great in November but lousy in February. If you're picking a team to go far, all else being equal, the first is most likely better than the second -- just don't assign too much importance to the last two or three games. A smart way to compare recent team performance is to check out our Last Ten Ratings, which indicate which teams are playing strongly in recent weeks. Certainly, recent performance isn't the ONLY factor -- slumping teams sometimes turn things around just in time for the NCAA Tournament -- but it's a significant one, and remember, you want to play the favorable odds.
3. Home-Away-Neutral
Some teams in the NCAA Tournament field have played very well at home, but poorly on the road. Other teams seem to perform well at neutral sites. Usually, only being good at home is a bad sign for the NCAA Tournament. To see how teams have played at home and on the road, check out the Away Ratings and the Home Ratings. The Neutral Ratings are probably the best indicator, but keep in mind that if a team has only played one or two games at neutral sites during the regular season, that sample size is too small to use as a basis for a decision.
4. Consistency
Some teams tend to beat the teams they're supposed to, and lose to the teams they're supposed to. Others might have beaten some better teams, but lost to some real stinkers. To measure this effect, we created our Consistency Rating. If a team has a high consistency rating, they're less likely to knock off a team much better than them, but they're also less likely to get upset by an underdog.
5. Overall Odds
If you want to win your NCAA bracket pool, we wouldn't advise putting a 16 seed in the Final Four. By looking at the Overall NCAA Tournament Odds, you can see the calculated odds (based on our power ratings) that each team will make it to each round of the NCAA bracket, given the opponents they will likely face. As we see every year in the NCAA conference tournaments and the NCAA Tournament, unexpected upsets always happen. But using calculated odds, you can be smarter about your upset picks by comparing the relative odds of similar seeds in different regions.
6. Conference vs. Non-Conference Play
How has a team played inside its league vs. outside its league? Odds are teams will face more non-league opponents in the NCAA Tournement, so looking for large discrepancies in League Ratings and Non-League Ratings may reveal some insightful information.
7. Wins and Points
Some teams have been exceptionally good in terms of margin of victory; others outperformed in close games. Usually, the Points Ratings are the best measure of which teams are actually the most skilled overall, in terms of outscoring their opponents, but Wins Ratings can give a good idea as to which teams tend to fare best in close games. All else being equal, if Team A and Team B have similar points ratings, but Team B has a higher Wins rating, then Team B may be better prepared for a pressure situation like the NCAA Tournament.
8. Good Wins and Bad Losses
To see how teams have fared against strong teams and weak teams, click on a team name in our NCAA BB section and look at the "vs. Top 25" and "vs. 26-50" columns on its detailed team stats page. For a further breakdown, look at their individual opponents (and their overall power rankings) at the very bottom of the team page. Has a lowly seeded team played any strong opponents? Do they have any big upset wins? That would be a good sign.
9. Individual Game Odds
To see how each team measures up against a potential opponent, the best thing you can do is use BracketBrains, our powerful and easy to use NCAA bracket predictions tool. BracketBrains uses over a decade of historical game results and sophisticated mathematical algorithms to analyze the results of past NCAA Tournament matchups statistically similar to each game in this year's tournament.
10. Fudge Factors.
Power rankings and other stats certainly can't model every aspect of an NCAA basketball matchup, and extenuating circumstances could even make some data irrelevant. For example, did a team play without their superstar for most of the season, but now he is coming back for the NCAA Tournament? Conversely, did the team just lose its leading scorer to injury in the conference tournament? Do they have a 7 foot big man matching up against a 6 foot 6 defender? Does their defensive style seem particularly well suited to shut down their opponent's offensive system? There is no way around it; subjectivity is often the only way to try to account for some of these harder-to-measure factors.
Here, you face a choice: either ignore anything that you can't quantitatively measure with reasonable accuracy, or tweak your data driven results based on your gut instinct about these final factors. Just beware of the single-lens trap -- by putting too much focus on only one aspect of a game, you inherently discount the dozens of other factors that will impact its outcome, and let bias creep into your decision process. Just ask yourself -- am I just trying to rationalize my gut instinct (bad), or is there really data to back it up (good)?
Conventional Bracket Prediction Wisdom That Sucks
1. RPI
The RPI rating was not designed to accurately pick the winners of future games. It's used to decide which teams get into the NCAA tournament, but beyond that it's pretty useless. This is a whole other discussion, but in short, the math behind it is just plain weak.
2. Conference Tournament Winners
The media likes to make a big deal about conference champions being "hot" going into the tournament, but in many cases, such "heat" does not translate into higher than expected performance levels in the NCAA Tournament. A three game winning streak does not a dominant team make.
3. NCAA Tournament Seed
As it turns out, 1 seeds are indeed much better teams than 16 seeds. Kudos to the NCAA Selection Committee for their fine work telling those teams apart. That said, the NCAA uses a flawed seeding system to create their brackets, and it doesn't necessarily follow, for instance, that a 7 seed is any better than a 10. So scratch out all the seed numbers on your NCAA bracket sheet and use BracketBrains or our NCAA basketball power rankings as a basis for matchup analysis instead.
Making Better NCAA Bracket Picks:
10 Tips for Powerful Bracket Predictions
