Winning the office pool for college basketball is kind of like a rite of passage for most any employee. You have not fully arrived until you can brag about how you picked the entire bracket without guessing even once. You can walk a little taller, and suddenly become THE authority on college basketball for the coming year. Still, the occasional office pool is won instead by a blind dog dropping his paw on each pick laid out beneath him. (I knew a guy that used this method) Still, a large number of years are won by the same people year in and year out. How do they do it? Here is what you did not know.

1. Forget about who you like – The Men’s NCAA tournament has no room whatsoever for personal love. You simply are better off with a bracket full of teams that you could care less about, and will have no ties to. How many times have you picked your team to run through the number one seed, and then march right through to the finals? Now, how many times has that actually happened? Exactly. Pick with your head and not your heart.

2. Pay attention to where the games are being played. Many people do not realize the impact this can have. If UNC is playing a 16 seed in Charlotte, you probably have no business trying to call an upset there. The same holds true, and even more so, when a 7 seed plays a 8 seed and the 8 seed is on or near their home court.

3. Do not put too much weight on depth. This goes against all reason in college basketball, but it is simply an overrated statistic. Having a deep bench is fantastic, and can certainly win games. But in March Madness, every team is fired up and rarely gets tired. If one team’s starting five is much better than another, do not count on the deep bench of average players to save them.

4. Pick the games round by round. Never ever look ahead until you have picked the current round. Your brain can do funny things here. A really unique or exciting possible match up will be too much for your picking skills to resist sometimes. Simply pick the first round, and then move on.

5. Do not try to be the one miracle bracket. My wife does this every single year. She picks every other game as an upset, and then gets excited when she picks a couple of the upsets. Seems backwards does it not? Simply pick with your common sense, and only pick logical upsets. The upsets are predictable in most cases if you really study. Then again, there is always the occasional David and Goliath, but the consistent brackets are the ones that win.

Tagged with: college basketball, march madness, ncaa, ncaa tournament

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