March Madness Guide

Want to know if your alma mater is going to make it to the big dance? Don't know a thing about college basketball but want to win your office pool? Here's a guide to everything March Madness: who gets in, why you need to pick some upsets, and who are some good bets to win it all.

Making the Dance

Sixty Five total teams get official invites to the NCAA tournament, though the two bottom ranked teams out of those sixty-five play off in a "play-in game" the Tuesday before the rest of the tournament begins. The sixty four team field is divided into four sixteen seeded brackets, which then play through in a single elimination tournament to crown the eventual national champion.

Thirty one teams received automatic invites to the big dance for winning their conference tournaments. The remaining thirty four slots are held open for at-large bids, which mostly go to schools from the major conferences (ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big East, Pac 10, and SEC). These bids are awarded based on a combination of factors, with the two most important ones being record (obviously the more wins you have the better) and strength of schedule: the committee that gives out bid which much rather let in a team that went 19-11 over the regular season but played in a very tough conference than a team that went 24-6 but played a bunch of garbage teams.

Winning it All

The number one thing to remember in filling out your brackets is that there are always going to be upsets. Always. Since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, there has never been a tournament where all four number one seeds made it to the final four, and there have been two tournaments where no number one seeds made it to the final four. Last year was the first year since 1985 that at least one team seeded 12 or higher one in the first round.

So how do you pick a winning bracket? Here are a few absolute rules that should remember.

• Remember that almost every bracket gives you more points for correctly picking the later rounds of the tournament: picking a final four team correctly can be worth as much as picking half a bracket right on the first day. So focus on finding teams that you think have a legitimate chance to make a deep run.
• Never pick a sixteen seed to beat a one seed in the first round. It has never happened before. Yes, there's that infinitely small chance that you could look like a genius if you get it right, but there are much greater odds that the one seed will have a deep run and you'll look like a fool.
• Find the weakest team you can with seed that is 5 or better, than pick them to be upset in the first round. Last year was the first year a 12 seed or worse didn't win in the first round, so odds are it will happen at least once this year. Try and find a high seed that crashed and burned in its conference tourney struggled down the stretch: an example this year might be Michigan State, which started out hot at 19-2 but has only gone 5-5 since then.
• Experience matters. Teams that pull upsets are ones that have played together for years and don't fall apart when facing adversity: a team with great chemistry and defense will often beat a much more talented (but inexperienced) team with a bunch of highly touted freshmen.
• Just pick already. There's a cottage industry out there for people who get paid by ESPN and other sports sites to analyze the tournament and fill out brackets, and the truth is they do don't do much better than the average guy filling out an office pool. The single-elimination format makes March Madness somewhat of crapshoot: so don't stress too much about your picks, just write down a few teams you like, then sit back and enjoy the games.