It’s March – that time of year when HOOPS MADNESS sets in, and everybody goes crazy for some NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship excitement.
And while you can take the time to study your challenge bracket of 64 teams, you know that the best way to fill out your bracket is not from the outside in, but from the inside out.
The Madness of March:
Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas
That’s right – you should consider starting with the easy piece of selecting who you feel the Final Four will be, and working your way out from there.
Will BUTLER be the team to watch this year? What about Gonzaga (the one team that Web Watch picks every year, who appears to have a legit shot at making it to the end this year for once)?
Once you have your Final Four selected in your bracket, work your way back outwards — filling in those teams onto their respective grid areas.
Next, if you haven’t already picked all #1 and #2 teams in your Final Four positions, take those seeds all the way as far as they can go. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t be picking the #1 and #2 teams to go as far as they possibly can into the tournament.
From here, it’s a crapshoot.
Web Watch has previously covered HOW TO PICK A WINNING MARCH MADNESS BRACKET, 10 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT PICKING YOUR BRACKET, and even some LAST MINUTE TIPS FOR COMPLETING YOUR BRACKET.
Everything you’ve learned in those posts still sounds true for the rest of your bracket selections.
As research is always important, you need to have a good handle on who everybody feels are the leading schools over a period of time rather than who is The Best School This Moment. That’s why you should be checking out THE BRACKET PROJECT.
The Bracket Project should be your one stop for all current ranking information from such sites as CBS SPORTS, ESPN, and YAHOO among others. Bleacher Report, Brackonomics, Sports Illustrated, and dozens more bracket-related websites are all represented, with each one of their rankings lists being used to generate the BRACKET PROJECT MATRIX. It brings everything together in one place, so you don’t have to bounce around to all those other sites and dig around for their Basketball predictions.
As of this writing, the Matrix was showing these schools as the #1 and #2 ranked seeds:
- Indiana
- Duke
- Kansas
- Gonzaga
- Miami (FL)
- Georgetown
- Louisville
- Florida
Want to pick some outliers and maybe make some prop bets in Vegas for those random schools that just might make it in at a #16 invite that nobody would ever expect? Scroll to the bottom of the list for those schools that have decent basketball programs, but haven’t made it onto enough of these prognasticator websites to warrant what should be a guaranteed slot. Schools like:
- Gardner-Webb
- NC-Asheville
- George Mason
- Savannah State
- UC Irvine
- Bryant
Oh, they’ll make the Big Dance one day… but likely not this year. Still, one never knows — Madness in March has led to any number of crazier things.