A Study in Bracketology

Shea Serrano pulled together a massive list of prizes for his women's bracket contest and got over 13,000 entries in his group alone. I knew the odds of winning were slim, but since the limit on entering brackets was 25, I wanted to see if I could at least get a perfect Final Four, Championship Round, and Champion.

There were 6 teams likely to make the Final Four. That made it pretty easy. I submitted 12 brackets.

The end results are skewed by all the ones picking Baylor jumping to the top. The column to watch is actually the one marked E8. This round consists of 4 games, each worth 80 points. Of my 12 brackets, 2 had all four games correct. (The others had a combination of the four that made it, plus Miss St and Louisville. Once Baylor and ND made it to the Final Four, I was covered no matter what happened in the other games.)

But that's just the Final Four. Of the 2 brackets, that had that correct, I had two remaining scenarios covered: Baylor over Notre Dame and Notre Dame over Baylor. Luckily, those teams met in the Championship. You can see the 2 brackets that earned 320 in E8 also earned 320 in F4.

Once that happened, I was covered either way. The question was would the points go to bracket #8 or bracket #4.

With only 6 teams in contention for the Final Four and two teams heavily favored to meet each other, I only needed 8 brackets to finish 320-320-320. (Brackets 9-12 were covering the bases of the other more unlikely scenarios.)

So I managed to finish 136th out of 13,000+. Not bad.

By comparison, the winner got 100 more points. 6 more games correct in the first three rounds.