A grad school friend and I do it every year, put in a couple of dollars and put it in my pool (if you are interested in joining my pool, it is cheap - $5, message me). It never wins, however, it can give you some general trends on who to like/avoid. We have data going back the last 15 years for all the teams that are in the tournament a some stats (Sagarin rating, sos, rpi, conference Sagarin, conference rpi, offensive and defensive statistics as well) to create a profile of winners and losers for each round based on the past 13 years of data. In the analysis when two teams fit the "winners" profile, we have two different decision rules for the tie breaker (absolute value of winning score, difference of winner profile score - loser profile score). The absolute value tends to be more liberal, while the difference score tends to be more conservative.

Over all trends: It predicted chalk early then goes a little haywire. Typically it tends to 'like' certain conferences and 'dislike' others. The liberal DR liked the Big Ten. The conservative DR really really liked the ACC.

Difference Score (liberal decision rule) Final Four: Maryland, Oregon, Xavier, & Purdue. Final: Purdue over Oregon

Absolute Value (conservative decision rule) Final Four: Miami, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Virginia. Final: Virginia over Miami

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Have an equal nominal amount on each dog today.

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

First round is almost all favorites except for a few 9s and 10s. In the early days of us doing this, we would see crazy 1st round upsets (first four years we would always have a 16 defeat a 1). What we would do is put a little on the 16 (with the points) that was predicted to win and we won all four years because the 1 wouldn't cover. But now that we have more data, it has become over all more conservative. We may start limiting it to data from the past 10 years (right now we have 20 years worth of data) because the older data may not reflect what is a good winner now.

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