Okay, so after a massive post giving all kinds of advice for filling out your NCAA tournament brackets for your pool, my bracket is, predictably, in shambles. I got off to a great start by my standards, picking 25 out of the 32 first round games correctly, and sitting 2nd in my pool after the first round. The 2nd round did not go so well, however, as I finished 8-8, and lost a Final Four team (Georgetown) and another team I had going to the Elite 8 (Pitt). The end result, I'm now tied for 21st out of 34. The reality is that shambles is probably a bit of an overstatement. My championship game participants and champion teams are still there, and if I can get that and virtually everything else, I can probably put a solid run together.
The question is, did following my own advice get me burned? And I would say that, to date, the answer is no, and in fact, I believe it helped me to a much stronger setup than I would normally have had. There is a ton of latitude within the realm of the advice I laid out, and I never guaranteed a good showing for following it.
Anyhow, let's look back at the advice that pertained to the first 2 rounds, and see how following it panned out.
Pick the top 4 seeds in each bracket to win their first round game
All of the 1, 2, and 3 seeds won their first games, and two 4 seeds (Vandy and UConn) fell, leading me to a 14-2 record in those 16 games. Following this strategy strictly also kept me from picking the "trap" upset of 14 Georgia over 3 Xavier. Getting that right, I took Xavier out to the Elite 8, and they are in the Sweet 16, with a favorable matchup to get to the Elite 8.
Don't fall in love with those 11 and 12 seeded teams
My advice was not to pick more than 1 or 2 upsets in this range. There were actually 3, as two 5 seeds and a 6 seed lost. I wound up not picking any upsets in this range, so I netted a 5-3 record in those games. One of those upsets did hurt me, as I had 6 seed USC going to the Sweet 16. In retrospect, I should probably modify this piece of advice to suggest picking at least 1 upset in this range, as their are usually a couple.
The money games in the first round are those 7 v. 10 and 8 v. 9 matchups
As a group, these are basically a coin-flip, as I said. I went 6-2 in these games, which was a nice showing that was the difference between a solid 25 win first round, and a lackluster 22-23.
Advance all of the #1 seeds to the Sweet 16
It's very good that I followed this piece of advice, or my second round would have been even worse. All 4 1 seeds are still alive, so that was an easy 4-0 in those second round games. I didn't have the numbers at the time, but on the broadcast they showed that 1 seeds had only lost 12 second round games since the field went to 64, now 12 in 24, which means on average a 1 seed loses in the 2nd round once every year. Trying to find one is too high a risk. As my advice suggested but didn't command, I also took all the 2 seeds to the Sweet 16 as well, which stung a bit as 2 of them went down, including Final Four pick Georgetown. Still, that was 6-2 for those games, as I suggested was the worst you would do taking all of the 1s and 2s to the Sweet 16. The real issue was taking Georgetown onto the Final Four, not specifically picking them to win that game.
The rest of my advice was related to things that we won't know about for another week or more, and I'll evaluate it as the time comes. The bottom line here is that I think my advice served me pretty well. I didn't shoot myself in the foot with crazy early round picks, which was the objective here. And really, if Georgetown doesn't blow a 17 point second round lead, I'd be in excellent shape at this point. Those are the kinds of things that no set of guidelines are going to help you avoid.
9 months ago
5 comments:
The test of any bracket is comparing it to the "pick all favorites" bracket. In this case, you did decently in the first round. Pick all favorites went 24-8, so you beat it by a game. The second round you got blown apart. Pick all favorites went 11-5. It's also missing only two of its Elite Eight (same as you) and none of its Final Four (one better than you).
So perhaps you didn't go far enough in your advice. Maybe we should just trust that the Selection Committee knows what it's doing. In fact, for people who know literally nothing about college basketball, I often suggest just picking all favorites. I don't think I've ever seen a pool where it won, but it's almost always in the top half.
Picking all the favorites is certainly a sound strategy for avoiding embarrassment. I refer to it as the trained chimp method, and I always measure my first round relative to it. I pay less attention to it as the tournament goes on, because historically it starts to break down relative to what you need to do to win a pool as you move along.
All of that being said, you raise a fair point, and if I were to re-issue advice at this point, I'd add a recommendation of only taking 1 underdog outside of the 4/5 matchups in the 2nd round. Now, of course, this doesn't significantly differ from what I did this time (I took two 6 seeds over 3s), but being that I'm playing to win, I'm okay with what happened this time, because it was really a worst case scenario, and didn't completely blow me up. Virtually all of my damage relative to the "trained chimp" method was isolated to the 2nd round.
I have in the past pondered filling out a bracket that takes all the favorites to the Sweet 16 and then picking the tournament from there, but never done it. I think next year, assuming I have more time than I did this year, I'm going to fill out a bunch of brackets using various rules like that just to start to see how they perform.
No need to wait for your experiment. You've got decades of historical data to play with.
i don't think the 12 & 13 seeds in tampa took your advice. i successfully picked siena and that's it!
Yeah, but the nice thing about that was that both the 12 and 13 won in both those regions, which meant that basically no one got those Sweet 16 teams correct.
So, I lost 2 Sweet 16 team picks as a result of those upsets, but pretty much everyone else did as well.
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