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The NCAA men’s basketball tournament – “March Madness” – has had the same 64-team bracket since 1985. The addition of the “First Four” games to settle the final 11-seeds and 16-seeds is more recent, but by the time the official first round begins, there are 64 schools ready to vie for a national championship. You can fill out brackets in any number of free online contests. You can also fill out a paper one (if you’re old-school like that) as part of an informal betting pool. Either way, if you fill out one, you’ll be making one of an estimated 60-100 million guesses as to the outcome of each game. Of the officially posted brackets, none have ever been perfect. In fact, the closest anyone has gotten is Gregg Nigl, who predicted the first 49 games of the 2019 bracket correctly. He made it to Game 50 – the second game of the Sweet 16 – where 3-seed Purdue beat 2-seed Tennessee, 99-94, in overtime.
Is Nigl a sports betting expert? Maybe, but that’s not his profession – he’s a neuropsychologist. Since then, the last perfect brackets have ended sooner – the 28th game in 2021; the first Friday of the tournament in 2022, when 11-seed Iowa State knocked off 6-seed LSU; the 25th game in 2023, when Fairleigh Dickinson shocked 1-seed Pursdue in the first round; and the 31st game in 2024, when 8-seed Utah State stopped 9-seed TCU.
We have put together some tips to help you get the most out of your bracket this year – so read on to maximize your College Basketball winnings.
NCAA News: March Madness Bracket Strategy
The Best Strategy for Filling Out a Bracket
You’ll be picking winners for 63 games in your bracket. The good news is that you don’t have to get them all right to win – as we saw above, no one has ever gotten close. However, if you’re going to win your pool or contend in one of the large online contests, you need to get a lot of them right. The NCAA has a Men’s Bracket Challenge Game (MBCG) each year, and if you look at the last eight winners in that contest, the average number of correct picks for the winning bracket is 51.4. That means that the average winner gets about 11 or 12 games wrong, but you have to make the right mistakes.
In most brackets, games double in value after each round, so being right matters more in the later rounds. Contest winners generally see their losses come in the early rounds. If we look back at the last eight MBCG winners, they combined to “lose” 93 games. Of those 93, 49 (53%) came in the first round. That’s not that surprising since 32 of the 63 elections (or 51%) come in the first round. The second round brought 29 combined winners. Beginning with the Sweet 16, though, you’re going to need to be just about perfect with your picks. Starting with the Elite 8, your bracket needs to be mistake-free for you to feel confident about winning.
How about those Elite 8 picks? If you get to that round with seven or eight of those picks left, then you’re still in good shape – as long as that eighth team you missed loses in this round. Even one or two mistakes can be survivable – seven of the last MBCG champions missed two Elite 8 teams or fewer. Combined, they picked 30 of the 32 Final Four schools correctly. The only exceptions were the Loyola-Chicago Cinderella in 2018 and the 2023 Miami Hurricanes. It becomes crucial, though, to get the picks right from here on out.
This means that you can’t stress about first- and second-round mistakes. If that 8-vs-9 matchup doesn’t go your way, or even if a 14-seed upsets a 3-seed, as long as you had that 3-seed fading before the Elite 8, you should be all right. After all, three of the last eight MBCG winners missed more than seven games in the first round. Five of the last eight winners have gotten at least one of their double-digit upset picks wrong, which means that the favorite won instead. In 2018, the champion won even though they had Virginia going to the Elite 8. That was the year Fairleigh Dickinson sent them home in the first round. What helped the champion that year was the number of brackets that had Virginia going even further – or even winning the whole thing.
One quick word about the championship game, though. Let’s say you get to the last game, and both of the teams are the ones you picked to get there. If this is you, you are way up high on the leaderboard. If you look back, the championship games matched some unlikely teams in the past. In 2017, we had UNC and Gonzaga. In 2019, we had Virginia and Texas Tech. In 2021, we had Baylor and Gonzaga. Picking finals matchups like that takes research – and a good bit of good fortune. Once you’re there, though, you’re miles ahead in terms of points. Yes, you want to get the winner correct, but depending on the size of your pool, and the picks that others make, things might even be academic at this point.
Common Bracket Mistakes
As you can see, there isn’t much room for error if you’re going to win a bracket pool. A lot of people focus on choosing the right upsets, but there are some obvious mistakes that you can help yourself avoid.
Don’t choose a team that has won fewer than six of their last 10 coming in. How have teams been playing in late February and early March? Some teams stumble into the tournament, standing tall in the early part of the regular season but then taking on some water in the second half of conference play. Then they get bounced in the first or second round of the conference tournament. They get an at-large pick to the Big Dance, but then they fall out in the first weekend, or even the first round. It might even be a blue-blood program! Just remember that the name on the front of the jersey (the school) is not what makes the plays to win.
Don’t let recent wins oversell you on a team, though. Yes, Oregon State rolled to a Pac-12 tournament title back in 2021. (Yes, there was still a Pac-12 in 2021, instead of the Pac-2 we have today). A team might go on a mighty run at the end of the regular season and sweep their conference tournament and take the automatic conference bid into the tournament. That team might have been underperforming all season, only to figure things out and play up to the level of their actual talent. They also might have been playing out of their minds during the conference tournament. In the first case, we can expect the opening round (or perhaps two) to go their way. However, once reality kicks in (and their later-round opponents get more game film on them), then it’s important to remember that the top seeds are the top seeds for a reason.
Don’t forget that a team’s reputation has nothing to do with this year’s performance. If you look at the ACC this season, you might not be surprised that Duke leads the men’s hoops standings. However, runner-up Clemson, which has been solid for a couple of seasons, is just a half-game out of the lead. Louisville has climbed out of the dumpster and sits in third. But how about North Carolina? They’re just seventh in the conference. Virginia? They’re just barely at .500 on the year at 12-12 (5-8 ACC). Syracuse (11-14, 5-9 ACC) is another historically great program struggling. Oh, and Miami – the 2023 Final Four team? Their head coach walked away a couple of weeks into the season, and the Hurricanes sit at 6-18 (2-11 ACC). So let’s say North Carolina is able to waltz through the ACC tournament somehow and get the automatic qualifier bid. They’re still an extremely shaky proposition to get to the second weekend, no matter how many championship banners hang in the Dean E. Smith Center.
Don’t pick any 16-seeds to win in the first round
Yes, Maryland-Baltimore County dropped Virginia as a 16-seed in 2018 – the first time in 136 tries that a 16-seed had beaten a 1-seed. Five years later, Fairleigh Dickinson did the same thing to Purdue. If you pick a 16-seed to win, and you end up being right, you can likely celebrate that win for about 48 hours, because a 16-seed won’t be winning two games on that opening weekend. The reward is a lot smaller than the risk – which includes marking off a team that could go all the way to the Final Four, or even further. So just avoid the temptation.
Don’t Choose Your Favorite Team to Win – Unless They’re Also an Elite Team
It’s one thing to get excited when your alma mater makes the Big Dance for the first time since 1957 or something. But they’re now a 13-seed for a reason. Could they beat that shaky 4-seed? Maybe. But will they get any farther than that? Don’t bet on it. Similarly, don’t pick against teams because you dislike personalities associated with them. Each week, we see more and more reasons not to like UConn’s Dan Hurley, for example. However, his Huskies are two-time back-to-back champions, and while they’re out of the Top 25 right now, they did just win at Creighton, and his system will make them a tough out in the tournament.
Tips for Picking Upsets / Reasons to Pick Higher Seeds
If you pick the favorites to win each game, you won’t win your pool. Choosing upsets is a must, but it’s important to be judicious. Not every 12-seed will knock off a 5-seed, even though this is the most common upset. You’ll want to pick some low seeds for upsets, but not too many. So how can you choose?
The selection committee gives some teams higher seeds than others for a variety of reasons. Their records might be better, but the committee also considers factors such as strength of schedule. However, sometimes the committee rewards program history and conference size too much. So a 5-seed from, say, the SEC who finished in the middle of the standings could be quite vulnerable to the second-place team from, say, the Atlantic 10.
Other factors to consider have to do with team pace, strengths and weaknesses. Some teams are built like the 1990s Detroit Pistons – terrific interior defense combined with inconsistent outside shooting. Other teams are built like the Golden State Warriors from the next couple of decades, designed to run and gun, shoot from deep, and just overwhelm the other team with their ability to simply score, using more of a “small ball” approach. Some matchups will favor one team over the other, even when the seeding seems to point you in a different direction.
You’ll also want to keep a key eye on injury reports because the absence of even one key player can make a difference for a team’s fortunes. Even though you pick the whole bracket before the start of the tournament, you can still reduce the chances that injuries will derail your team with a quick check of those reports before you lock in your brackets.
In the final analysis, March Madness is very difficult to p redict – it’s called “Madness” for a reason. However, with enough research, you can keep a lot of the seemingly random factors at play from wrecking your bracket.
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) February 10, 2025
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