The NCAA tournament starts tomorrow and I have my picks made. I made them at Yahoo! because it was easy, and while I can’t link them for you to see, I’ll get some screen caps and put them in my next post so you can see my bracket in detail should you be inclined. (Blogger is really slow right now, so that may take a bit of time.) What I did was to take the research done by a couple UNC business profs and slavishly follow it. In each potential game I chose as winner the team which they ranked as being the stronger. Now, since we are dealing with probabilities rather than certainties, it doesn’t follow that this will be exactly correct. But since Yahoo! doesn’t weight upsets, as long as I predict more outcomes correctly, I will do better. This is partially offset by the fact that Yahoo! does weight later games more heavily than early round games, but I’m hoping that with enough correct predictions in the early rounds, I’ll have enough teams left to garner me good points in the later rounds as well. And, I really couldn’t do much worse than I did last time anyway.
Going by the strength ratings means that I haven’t picked very many upsets, only six in all. The upsets I did pick are:
First Round
Atlanta Regional
9 NC Wilmington over 8 George Washington
Oakland Regional
10 Alabama over 7 Marquette
Minneapolis Regional
9 Wisconsin over 8 Arizona
Second Round
Minneapolis Regional
5 Nevada over 4 Boston College
Third Round
Atlanta Regional
3 Iowa over 2 Texas
Oakland Regional
4 Kansas over 1 Memphis
Fourth Round
None
Semi-Finals and Finals
These are a bit fuzzier since these teams weren’t seeded against each other. So I have Duke beating UCLA and Villanova beating UConn and then Duke beating Villanova for the championship. No real upsets to speak of.
Neh 