NCAA logoAre you needing help with your bracket? Need a new system after finishing third from the bottom last year in the office pool, one spot ahead of the wierd guy in accounting, who narrowly edged your boss’s cat Snuggles that was making picks by licks, purrs and feline nickname familiarity?
We here at the TFP are to help. My philosopy is detailed below. Two sharp young ladies from the timesfreepress.com team have agreed to share other approaches online, and you can follow our success at our website. Maura Friedman has hitched her wagon to analytics, leaning heavily on numbers and help from Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight.com. Mary Helen Martin has taken the off-key and creative approach of anagrams. Good luck with that.
I work backward, deciding on our Final Four — the teams we believe to be the best that are playing well right now — and draw from the four back to round one. This means we have penciled in the four — Florida, Arizona, Michigan State and Louisville — we picked Monday in my online column “5-at-10” on timesfreepress.com. Yes, it means we have the same Final Four as President Obama, and that means we are definitely going to have to enter a second bracket now.
When we first put that quartet down, we felt good about having a mix of 1 seeds and other seeds. When we saw the released Vegas odds — those four are the four favorites to win the whole thing according to the guys in Sin City who do this for a living — we felt simultaneously good and bad. You never want to walk straight favorites, but these are the Vegas favorites not the selection committee favorites.
So we’re sticking there — although I boldly pronounced Syracuse as my pick in late January, and the Orange’s implosion in the final furlong has given everyone pause, which naturally means they are going to win it all — and now the scoring tricks come in.