March Madness: General Bracket Strategy

March 15, 2024

Mark Kieffer gives his best tips for filling out brackets for March Madness. What strategies can you use to try and have the most successful bracket?

It is currently March and while most of the focus on March Madness is on the bubble, very quickly it will be Selection Sunday and turn into filling out brackets.

Most sites will give you picks and share their own opinions of brackets. That stuff can be fun, but they don't always tell you how to fill out a bracket. I've never won a big pool but I've won some small ones, workplace ones.

I will share my opinions with general rules and guidelines on how I fill out brackets. The tournament isn't set yet but we can still have a strategy so when the teams are called, we just follow it and fill it in.

Pick Your Final Four First

I am 39 years old and have been doing brackets since I was 12 or 13. Because I watch so much college basketball, I can sometimes get in the weeds. What I mean by that is I pick a couple of teams to upset, and then I pick them to play each other in the Sweet 16. After, I have this Cinderella in the Elite Eight that also has a 50% chance of losing the tournament's opening game.

What I try to do is pick my Final Four first and then backfill. Most bracket contests have weighted points. Missing that first-round upset isn't a huge deal to win your pool. In every pool I have won, I have gotten the Final Four right, or three out of four in the Final Four right.

This might lead to the next question: how do I pick the Final Four?

Pick Teams in the Top 20 on Offense and Defense To Go Far

This used to be an edge, but now it is well-known by most sports fans. Since 2002, only two teams have not been in the top 20 in both offense and defense on KenPom. What I try to do regardless of seed is identify those teams. Now, there are times where a team is outside the top 20 in one of those, and then their play in the tournament gets them inside the top 20 by the National Championship.

Based on these parameters, these are the teams that have a strong chance of making a deep run if not winning the National Championship:

It is very likely I'm going to pick a national champion from one of these teams when the brackets come out. If teams on this list are slated to play each other on my bracket, I'll probably use best overall team as a tiebreaker. Last year, this got me onto UConn to win it all from a four seed. They were top 10 in both offense and defense.

Pick a No. 12 Seed Over a No. 5 Seed But Not Too Many

This is one of those situations that everyone knows but does too often. I know people that treat these games like a coin flip but they aren't. No. 5 seeds win 65 percent of the time. If there is a No. 12 you really like, pick them, but don't go too crazy. Last year, all the No. 5 seeds won.

Ditto For No. 13 Seeds

Let's say you want to get crazy and embrace March Madness. That's cool. No. 13 seeds win about 21 percent of the time. It happens but don't pick more than one. What I used to do is pick a No. 12 over No. 5, a No. 13 over No. 4, and then the No. 12 over the No. 13, only to have the No. 4 seed make it to the Sweet 16 and have my bracket in shambles. Don't do that. Getting a first-round upset wrong won't kill your bracket... especially if they end up losing in the round of 32.

It's March Madness.... Sort of

So many eyes are on the first round, which is when the upsets happen. But in reality, the higher seeds generally do better than the lower seeds deeper into the tournament. The lowest seed to win it all was an eighth-seeded Villanova in 1985.

#TBT 1985 National Championship starting lineups Georgetown vs Villanova #BigEastHoops pic.twitter.com/7WOdYoR16M

— Big East Rewind & Hoops 24/7 (@bigeastrewind) March 1, 2019

The lowest seed to make a Final Four was an 11 seed and it has happened five times. St. Peter's was an awesome story a couple of years ago when as a No. 15 seed, they made the Elite Eight. That has happened one time ever.

Since 1985, when the tournament expanded to 64 teams, here is how often each seed has won the NCAA Tournament.

1 seed - 63 percent of the time
2 seed - 13 percent of the time
3 seed - 11 percent of the time
4 seed - five percent of the time
5 seed - never
6/7/8 - two-and-a-half percent each

The first round is fun with some upsets and after the first weekend, the cream starts to rise to the top. The tournament overall isn't quite as "crazy" or "mad" as the marketing suggests it to be.

Use KenPom Ratings and Free-Throw Shooting Differences as Tiebreakers

KenPom isn't an edge when it comes to sports betting, but in a very casual pool like a work pool where very few people will do any kind of research, it is a great tool to use that has helped me win such pools.

If two teams are very close in rating, I will give the nod to the team with better free-throw shooting if it's significant. If that is not significant, then I will choose by the team that has the better defensive metric. It doesn't always work and I don't always stick to it, but these are some ideas.

Have Fun

At the end of the day, if brackets were easy to predict, then those office pools wouldn't be as fun. What makes them so much fun is that anybody can win. I print off brackets and have my entire family do them. The fun is the fact that all you have to do is pick a winner and anyone can do that, whether it's research, gut instinct, or because of the mascots.

What I have found is if I stick to many of these basic guidelines, I often finish better than most in the field because I just try to be as solid as I can and let others make mistakes. If you are reading an article like this one, you might be putting in more effort than those you play against. Have fun and realize it likely won't pan out, but if it does pan out.... Congrats!

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