MARCH MADNESS TIPS

Updated 3/11/2011 - The information below is still relevant when it comes to picking your March Madness brackets. There will be updates coming soon for my March Madness Tips for the 2011 tournament. In the mean time, take a look at a couple of great sites that I have found.

Take a look at the 2011 NCAA basketball tournament schedule here.

Check out this great article about the 2011 Conference Championship Week.

CasinoDave.com's 2011 Bracket Tournaments - Find all of the best NCAA bracket contests online all on one page!

What is the best way to win an office bracket contest? Surprisingly enough, you shouldn't be worrying about the number of picks that you get right, although this is still important. What you should be more focused on is looking at what teams the country overall has selected (since you won't be able to see other people's brackets until the games start).

This information should be available at most of the big sports companies contests like ESPN. What you want to do is find games with close to evenly matched teams and try to pick a few games each round against the country. People will tend to make selections based upon who everyone else is picking. If you can correctly get those few upsets picks, that should make the difference between being in the middle of the pack and being at or near the top of the pool.

Of course, this is not without flaw. If you get your upset picks wrong, it can ruin your bracket since other people may have teams that go beyond the first or second round of the tournament. In the first round, never try to predict a 1-16, 2-15, or 3-14 upset. The best case scenario is that you get that game right and don't have them going any further in the tournament. The worst case scenario is one of those teams makes a run and you don't have a prayer of winning.

Even 4 seed vs 13 seed is a little troublesome as well. These teams are still capable of making it far in the tournament and you probably won't have any seed lower than 10th going any further than the 2nd round, unless you what are the one person in the country to guess correctly that George Mason would make the Final Four.

Luck ultimately plays the key roll when it comes to winning a pool on any given year. You can increase these lucky odds by employing systematic and repeatable tactics that will give you a shot of winning or coming close once every couple of years. If you do this correctly, you should be in the top 25% of entries as often as you are in the bottom 75% of entries.

Things to look at before you make your pick:

1. Is the team hot or cold right now? Take a look at the last 10 to 15 games a team has played, their competition and margin of victory/defeat to get a feel for this.
    
2. Did they get knocked out of their conference tournament early? This can have a effect in multiple ways. The team could be rusty once the tournament starts, not having played for almost two weeks. They could also have been on the bubble and might get a free playing attitude with a new lease on life.
    
3. Who have they played this year? If their non-conference schedule doesn't show a lot of promising games, they probably aren't going far. Example, Oakland University looks pretty good with their 26-8 record, but they are 0-4 against top 25 teams with an average loss of 30 points. Add it up in your head, if the team's schedule doesn't say they will do good, they usually won't. This is a good way to mentally pass a 1 or 2 seed into the Elite 8 without worrying about it.
    
4. Who is everyone else picking? You may want to buck the trend and have some lower ranked team make the Elite 8 (implies 4 seed - 6 maybe 7 seed).
    
5. How far does the team have to travel? The number 1 seeds and often number 2 or 3 seeds are usually place in their geographic bracket. This means the team does not have to travel far and usually can mean that this team can make a significant run. I Also look for lower seeds that are close to home, like Tennessee in the Midwest bracket or Gonzaga and BYU in the West.

One more good tip - Don't pick any at large team with a sub .500 conference record to win more then one game.

Ways to make your brackets different than others without going overboard:

1. Pick at least one number 2 seed and one number 3 seed to lose before the Sweet 16
2. Don't pick more then two number 1 seeds in the Final Four
3. Pick a team seeded 1 or 2 to win the national championship
4. Don't go too far into the tournaments with 4 or 5 seeds
5. Pick one and only one number 1 seed to lose before the Elite 8

2010 March Madness Predictions.

Take a look at the current lines for the first round games on the NCAA basketball picks page. This will give you a good idea of what games the sportsbooks think that an upset is possible.

What you want to be wary of early in the tournament is that one of your upsets specials doesn't go on to win in the first round make a run. For that reason, I'm against picking any upsets in the Midwest region in the first round, save the 7-10 and 8-9 games. After the first round, Kansas is almost going to be a lock for the Final Four. With this in mind, I wouldn't be against picking some upsets in the later rounds of this bracket. My dark horse for this bracket is going to be 6 seed Tennessee, I have them matching up against Kansas in the Elite 8.

I was pretty unimaginative in the West for the first round. The only upset I picked was Minnesota over Xavier although I'm a little nervous about even that pick. After the first round, I have a couple of upsets including BYU beating Kansas State and Pittsburgh making the Final Four.

In the East bracket, my first 12 over 5 pick is going to be Cornell over Temple. I'm mainly basing this on a shared common opponent of Kansas. Temple lost at home by 32 and Cornell lost on the road by 5. That's the only upset that I have in the first round besides 10 seed Missouri over 7 seed Clemson. After that, I have pretty much everything playing out with the higher seeds winning except 6 seed Marquette over 3 seed New Mexico.

I think that the South bracket is most likely the one that will have multiple upsets and any one of the top four seeds making the Final Four. It's just that you have to be careful about picking the upsets. The game that tears at me the most is 7 seed Richmond vs 10 seed St Mary's, flip a coin. I have a feeling that Duke will be the first 1 seed to fall to Purdue and Villanova will end up making the final four.

For the Final Four, I got a traditional championship game matchup between Kansas and Kentucky and I don't have any idea who will win. I'm going to go with my gut on this one and pick Kansas. Yeah I know, take the number one seed overall as the champion, very inventive. But, I don't care they have an awesome team and it will probably be one of these two teams to win it all.