Winning Your NCAA Tournament Bracket Pool

Written by Jack Jones - Google +

If you want to fill out a bracket and win your NCAA tournament pool then it’s important for you to follow the guidelines below.

Trust the Odds

Seeds one through three have won the NCAA Tournament 95% of the time, so don’t expect a dark horse to come through and cut down the nets this season. If you want to have the best chance of winning your first round games, then look for the larger favorites. If a team is favored by more than eight points, then they will win more than 81% of the time.

All-Americans

Of the last 28 national champions, 27 of them had at least one All-American on their team. Expect guys like John Wall of Kentucky and Evan Turner of Ohio State to carry their teams on their backs. Some other teams with top players are Villanova, Oklahoma State, Maryland, Duke, Syracuse, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Kansas, Kansas State, and West Virginia.

Travel

You think the home crowd isn’t important? Over the past 12 years teams playing within 100 miles of campus won 77% of their games. At 250 miles the teams won 69% and it dropped to 46.5% for teams having to go more than 500 miles from home. Of course, one of the benefits of the higher seeds is the close location, so who knows if it’s a direct correlation or just better teams getting the best venues.

Experience

This applies to both coaches and players. Coaches that go to the Final Four have on average just under twice as many tournament games under their belts as the average. Teams that have been in the tournament for more than three consecutive seasons also tend to do better. This format is a different beast than the regular season and it takes being there to know how to best prepare.

Inside Scoring

It seems like every year I have to hear announcers talk about senior leadership from the guards being so important. In actuality, if you have inside scoring then you are better off. The stats from our NCAA tournament tips show that seeds that get contributions from forwards and centers are more likely to pull the upset.

Think about it. These teams are playing in much larger venues so the backgrounds are different from what they are used to. The nerves are high and you have to win a bunch of games in a row to win it all. If you are shooting from six feet from the basket you don’t have to be nearly as accurate as you do from outside the 3-point arc so all things considered it makes sense that teams relying on their frontcourt end up doing well in the tournament.

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