The NCAA men's basketball tournament will include 68 teams this year. The "First Four" games will be played on Tue and Wed (Mar 15-16), then the "second round" starts on the traditional Thursday (Mar 17).
What do you think I should do about the 68 teams in terms of the Excel bracket? I was thinking to leave it as is (just 64 with placeholders), since most people's pools won't start until Thursday anyway. But those first four games are likely going to be toss-ups (bubble teams vs. "weaker" conference champions) and generate interest among fans. The "right" thing for me to do is to create the bracket with 68 teams and build a way for people to select 64 or 68 team brackets on their own, but that's a lot of work to build in the dual flexibility. That said, I want this to continue to be useful and accurately represent the competition.
What should I do? How are you going to do your pool/brackets? Vote below, and put your thoughts in the comments section.
By the way, when the brackets are available, I'll put them on a separate tab on this blog at the following link:
http://whistleblows.com/brackets/
[polldaddy poll=4468978]
I think that omitting the 4 play-in games is the best option. I use this spreadsheet to administer my office pool, and I like to give folks until Thursday to submit so that my number of entries is maximized. I think I will miss out on a bunch of people if I rush them to submit a bracket by Tuesday night. Also, yahoo has opened up its bracket challenge and it is omitting the play-in games, if that means anything to you.
ReplyDeleteI think the first four games would count a 1/2 point. That would eliminate some tie possibilities down the stretch. I love the work you put in for this and our little group use it from 6 states to consolidate our prognosticator skills! I hope you find a way to add the 68 for fun!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your work on this project, it was so much fun last year.
Bob Rodger
Hi,
ReplyDeleteGreat file thanks for making it available! I run a pool and would like to use it, but with a small tweak I am wondering if you could help with. For upsets, I score double points (i.e. a 1 point game is worth 2, a 2 game is worth 4, etc) and I only score them in the first two rounds, which is different from your upset formula included in the file. Any way you could help?
Thanks again and congratulations on a great program.
Jeff
I want to thank you for creating this file. It certainly does make running a tournament pool a lot easier. Regarding your question about what to do with the play-in games - I think you should do the bracket with 68 teams. The play-in games could possibly be strong teams that possibly could advance. Right now Virginia Tech is projected to be one of those 4 teams and they beat Duke this year. This wouldn't be a 16 seed vs a 1 seed type situation. If you don't allow the participants to pick the game, what happens if that team wins again? Also, I think it is fair to say that the bracket will be expanded even more than it has. At some point there will be 90 some teams. People would then be forced to turn in the bracket on Tuesday. So why not get people used to turning in their bracket early?
ReplyDeleteI do think you should follow the way ESPN or CBS does the bracket as that will be the standard. I just think with teams being competitive in that play-in game, you are setting yourself up to not allow people to pick winners that could advance past just the first or second round. Tough situation for sure.