Ten Guidelines for Picking a Perfect March Madness Bracket

The last week has been a bit of a whirlwind for me, so I wasn’t able to meet my goal of getting a Seedigami post up before Selection Sunday. No bother. I’ve done enough analysis to know what my last 4 Perfect Bracket Parameters are, so I’ll skip straight to that point. I’ll try to get some Seedigami and Seed Performance Trends up before the tournament begins on Thursday, as well as to share my breakdown of this year’s field and my picks.

Remember, our goal is to have someone, anyone, fill out a perfect March Madness bracket. The odds of achieving this are somewhere in the range of 1 in 20 billion to 1 in 100 billion. These Perfect Bracket Parameters aim to get us into or beyond the low end of that range, or, to put it in a more visceral way, to produce a book as wide as Texas so that we have a shot at flipping said book to the exact right page. It’s going to take a lot of page flippers.

Several of the guidelines below will be familiar if you’ve read my earlier posts. The first, however will be new:

1. One of the following 9 Guidelines will be wrong.

An odd place to start, yes. But in spite of the fact that there are some clearly detectable trends that narrow our odds, the NCAA Tournament is innately volatile. I’ve tried to craft guidelines that adhere to the key trends that have shaped the 39 tournaments of the 64+ team era, but we need to consider them like an image from a coloring book. Try to color neatly, but it’s ok if a few crayon marks creep outside the lines here and there.

2. Predict between 16 and 22 total upsets.

2a. Upsets should be divided into the following ranges:

• 7-12 Minor Upsets

• 6-11 Major Upsets

• At least 1 Bracket Buster (but no more than 3)

3. Don’t predict more than 2 Major Upsets in the Sweet 16 and beyond.

3a: But be sure to scatter minor upsets throughout the tournament.

If you need a refresher on these upset types, click here.

4. Pick at least one Elite 8 upset.

5. Aim for a Madness Factor between 70 and 125.

For a refresher on the Madness Factor and why this is the range to shoot for, click here.

6. Don’t spread the Madness evenly across all 4 regional brackets.

As I mentioned in my Madness Factor analysis, upsets tend to cluster. You’ll almost always see one bracket that is a madness magnet and one that is a madness repellent; the other two may lean mild or wild, depending on the year. Recent results suggest more wild than mild.

7. Never pick an upset free regional bracket.

8. Pick between 5 and 9 “non-chalk” Sweet 16 qualifiers.

8a. Pick at least one double-digit seed to make the Sweet 16.

In tournament vernacular, “chalk” means the expected outcome. An all-chalk Sweet 16 would mean that the top 4 seeds advanced in each regional bracket. This has never happened. The closest we’ve seen is two chalk brackets and two with one non-chalk entrant, in 2009 and 2019. Most tournaments see between 5 and 9 higher seeded teams crash this party, including at least one double-digit seed.

9. Pick at least one team seeded 6 or higher to reach the Elite 8.

This has happened in all but 6 tournaments in the modern era.

10. The total of the seeds of your predicted Final 4 should be between 7 and 16.

All four one-seeds have advanced to the Final 4 only once, in 2008. And while the national champion is almost always a 1- or 2-seed, high-seeded interlopers regularly make the Final 4. Just think of 11-seed NC State from last year, 9-seed Florida Atlantic from two years ago, and so on. The average seed total of the four Final 4 teams is actually 11.87, far higher than I would have expected.

There you have it. Ten guidelines to follow if you want any shot, even a slightly-more-improbably-than-a-lottery-ticket one, to find that elusive perfect bracket. Good luck.