Sports

Attacking the brackets: a regional strategy

NoC Sports Desk

It’s no secret that Kentucky will be one of this year’s bracket favorites. They will in all likelihood be a number one seed. And having lost only two games all season, they will have a better than average chance of reaching the final four.

Will they win it all? Who knows and, from the standpoint of maximizing your bracket’s potential to emerge victorious in your NCAA pools, who cares. Since the brackets have yet to be announced, who could even wager a winning guess at this point.

But that shouldn’t stop any and all bracketologists from at the very least forming a plan of attack.

You could fill out 50 brackets with any number of combinations of winners, final fours and upsets. And you would have a great chance of winning at least a pool or two with your picks. But who has $500 to blow these days.

Game Planning

Here’s where game planning comes in. At NoC, we usually play anywhere from 10 to 15 brackets annually. A few at various workplaces, a few online, and a few with friends living in states across the country.

Why send a handful of brackets all the way across the country? Because if you’re going to pick Kentucky to win it all, then your best shot of winning with that bracket is in a location where few people are likely to pick UK as the winner.

Think of it as regional economics.

Out West in places like San Francisco and Klamath Falls, brackets are full of Utahs, UCLAs, Gonzagas and St. Mary’s. Maybe not as champions, but as deep-runners, cinderella stories, etc. It is a statistically prove-able fact that West coast basketball fans favor a higher percentage of West Coast teams to project far in the tournanet. Our three-year analysis suggests a 22% exuberance factor from the brackets of West Coast basketball fans for their regional biases.

The same goes in the East (26% exuberance factor), the SEC (38%) and even here in Kentucky (74%). In sports as in politics and nationalisms, people tend to pick what they know and see often.

Having run a pool or two in the past, we can’t begin to count the number of local brackets that have had Kentucky winning it all. No matter who the coach was or what year. If you factor in this year’s team with all of its success…well, you have a better chance of winning the Powerball Lottery than picking a bracket in Lexington with Kentucky as the winner.

The NoC Plan

Here’s what we plan to do. We’ll definitely be picking two, maybe three, brackets with UK winning it all. We’ll simply refuse to play those brackets in Kentucky and, with few exceptions, on the east coast. Our Kentucky picks go to San Francisco, Vancouver, Denver and Las Cruces.

This year our one exception to the regional rule is Tennessee. With our contacts in the middle Tennessee vector, we’ll place brackets that exhibit initially a high SEC exuberance, but we will finish instead with a Big East-heavy Final Four followed by a Kentucky national championship.

The thinking here is that the middle Tennessee area has many SEC fanatics, with the three main populations of fanbases comprising (in descending order) the Tennessee, Vandy, and Kentucky sectors. Because both Vandy and Tennessee will be in this year’s tournament, there is a good likelihood of the Kentucky national champion vote getting siphoned off through an abnormally high Vandy/Tennessee exuberance factor (which itself could also be expressed through an over-abundance of SEC-heavy final four brackets.)

Here locally in the inner Bluegrass, we’ll take our chances with Kansas, Syracuse, Purdue and West Virginia. Or maybe Ohio State, Duke, Kansas State and Villanova. For many years, Duke, in particular, was a big winner here–speaking strickly in terms of mazimized bracket efficiency, of course.

In any case, the moral here is that you’ll have a much better chance of winning each pool you enter if you target your picks to the region in which those picks will be played. You’ll be getting more for your money.

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