How-To Fill Out Your March Madness Bracket

With March Madness upon us and every office in America doing a “bracket challenge”, it is important to know the proper way to fill out your NCAA Bracket.  You have a 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance of doing something no one has done before by filling out a perfect bracket.  But before you can be prefect, you have to know how to fill it out.

1) Decide if you are a paper or online person. There are printable brackets or online brackets on websites like ESPN or Yahoo!.

2) Once you have picked your style of bracket, it is time to make your Round of 64 picks.  Do research so you don’t make picks that will never happen. Choosing a 1-seed to lose to a 16-seed is never advisable, because it’s never happened.  But most years a 12-seed beats a 5-seed.  Sites like USA Today and CBS Sports will help you make informed decisions about your picks.  This is the smartest way to pick a good bracket.  Doing this research may help you win, but there are other ways to pick winners too.

3) Decide how you are going to pick the winners. Coin flips, favorite jerseys, famous alumni, and many other ways are used to pick the winners of each game.  And, of course, there’s the good ol’ way of choosing the best record or the lowest seed.  This is another way to choose winners if doing all of that research just isn’t for you.  Plus, research doesn’t always guarantee you’ll have a successful bracket, so it’s always nice to have fun with your picks.

4) Pick some upsets! There has only been one time in the Tournament’s history where all 1- seeds made the Final Four; they’re bound to lose at some point.  As stated in Step 2, you shouldn’t pick a 16-seed to upset a 1-seed but a 12-seed over a 5-seed isn’t a terribly unlikely pick.

5) Finish the Round of 64 before moving on to the Round of 32 and so on. This will make sure you know what match-ups you are picking when you get there.

6) Continue this process until you’ve determined the champion.  There is usually a clear cut favorite that emerges when doing research.  Be wary of them!  They fall more likely than not.  Take the team that is favored in their games and has one of the easier routes.  This is how you will choose the champion and show your office who the real pick king/queen is.

7) Look back over it and make sure that you are comfortable with how far you may have taken the lower-seeded teams and how early you may have taken out the higher-seeded teams.  Sometimes you look back over it and don’t like that you have a 12-seed making it to the Final Four, say.  Other times you might notice that you in fact took all 1-seeds to the Final Four on accident.  Making adjustments at the end are what will set your bracket apart from the rest.

8) Once done, send it in to ESPN or your office pool and reap the benefits of having the best bracket.

Realize that you are trying to pick the games as accurately as possible, but going perfect is not likely.  The key is to limit the mistakes in the early rounds so they do not hurt you in the later rounds.  If you follow the steps laid out here, you will surely walk away victorious in your bracket challenge and leave all of the other brackets busted.