Tips for Your March Madness Bracket
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With the football season kaput, the eyes of this sports degenerates turns to the NBA. And then when I remember the NBA is a solved game that only has two plays, “tall man makes layup” and “shorter tall man hits more threes than World War II-era sniper Simo Häyhä had confirmed kills,” my eyes turn to college basketball.
The college basketball season comes to a head with a 68-team tournament first colloquially and now officially called March Madness.
Today is Selection Sunday. The day we learn who’s making the cut, who’s going to the NIT (the Not Important Tournament), and whose season is over.
As is tradition, basketball fanatics and filthy casuals like me will fill out a bracket, attempting to predict which team of Gumby-shaped pseudo-adolescents will make it through the gauntlet.
And as a one-time co-champion of The Can of Spam Challenge, I am clearly an extremely qualified person to give you advice on how to make your picks. Not one of the outright champions. And certainly not some basketball pundit who has done nothing but watch all 5,700+ games played over the course of this season. NERDS!
Advice #1: Do some research
Sadly, you will actually have to learn somethings about basketball, like how teams have been performing and how they play the sport.
“You don’t honestly expect me to learn something, Dan,” you may be screaming after spit taking your entire barista-made iced americano at your computer screen, terrifying the coffee shop patrons around you and prompting one of them to call social services, “I am a busy person with a full time job managing an artisanal email factory. We’ve been voted best factory four years running by Mass Email Magazine. I have to make sure all of our eblasts are handcrafted with that mom-and-pop je ne sais quoi. I don’t have time to grind tape on 68 teams.”
Exactly. Nobody does, not even the . The quickest way to study is by looking at advance stats as compiled on kenpom.com. The O-rating will tell you how good at scoring points they are. The D-rating will tell you how good a team is at keeping the other guys from scoring.
Luck is a glorified turnover metric, with higher rankings meaning they are more likely to benefit from turnovers than to be making them.
AdjT stands for “adjusted tempo,” which is just a fancy way of saying “this is a measurement of how fast a team likes to play.”
There are many other metrics the website offers, but those four are most useful.
Advice #2: Bet on slow teams to upset fast teams
Part of a bracket challenge is picking first round upsets. Understanding kenpom.com’s luck and tempo metrics can help you do this.
Many high ranking college basketball teams run fast offenses inspired by fun’n’gun offense Paul Westhead perfected at Loyola Marymount in the 1980s and the seven-seconds-or-less offense Mike D'Antoni ran with the Arizona Suns in the mid-aughts. The Alabama Crimson Tide’s offense takes these to their logical extremes. Their games resemble a forty-yard dash meet than a basketball game.
But this style of play has limited returns. Of the last 10 champions, only one has ranked higher than 50th in tempo. Last year’s champion UConn team ranked 330th; there are 362 Division I basketball teams.
It turns out that asking gangly barely-not-adolescents to move at the speed of light means they have to make very, very quick decisions. And nineteen year-olds do not always make good decisions under the best of circumstances. Just ask a car insurance adjuster.
If you can find a low seed team that ranks low in tempo and high in luck going up against a high seed team that ranks high in tempo and lower in luck, taking the low seed may be the right move. This is usually formula whenever an Ivy League team makes a surprise run in the tournament, but public commuter schools like my hometown Oakland Grizzlies can follow this path to victory, as they did last year when they blew the basketball world’s mind by beating a wildly talented and wildly undisciplined Kentucky Wildcats team featuring a roster full of NBA draft picks. As opposed to Oakland’s roster, which was full of future car insurance adjusters.
Advice #3: Value defense
The object of basketball is to put up more points than the other guys, but that is not a guiding principle. There are two hoops on the court, and you would be surprised by how many teams do not fully understand you are allowed to prevent the other team from putting the ball in their hoop. There’s a reason “defense wins championships” is a cliche.
Take the Iowa Hawkeyes. Under soon-to-be-former head coach Fran McCaffery, they routinely ranked in the upper echelons of offensive output but on defense they are about as tough as an eighth-grade co-ed kickball team called The Martha Vineyard Chardonnay Dogs. In McCaffery’s 15 years at the helm, they have never made it out of the tournament’s first weekend.
By contrast, look at Rick Pitino’s St. John’s Red Storm. They rank 1st overall on defense and only 64th on offense per kenpom.com, and they’re poised to make a run. I suppose it helps that Rick Pitino has the power of The Devil on his side, having clearly sold his soul to Beelzebub for another chance to coach high level basketball after being ousted from Louisville for paying recruits with money, shoes, and prostitutes sex workers.
Advice #4: If all else fails, make your pick based on which mascot would win in a fight
For years, I would fill out a bracket based solely on which team’s mascot would win in a fight. If the team did not have a mascot, I would decide based on the team’s namesake. I’d find myself predicting the same outcome every year, picking the Duke Blue Devils to come out on top.
Why did I always pick the Duke Blue Devils? Because you can’t beat The Devil. Just ask Rick Pitino.
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