This certainly was a challenge, was it not?
Congrats to "Connor" for edging out "chucksker" in the tiebreaker, and winning the 2nd Annual CN Bracket Challenge! Please contact one of our head-guys for details on how to claim your prize. I'm not sure what's available, maybe bragging rights, or perhaps a copy of the upcoming 2011 Cornhusker Kickoff? That would be sweeeet.
That's "yours truly".... down there in 32nd place. I tanked again, but I tried some funny things this year with brackets. More on that after the jump...
Thanks again to everyone who signed up for a bracket. Maybe next season we'll have a home team to cheer for as well?
So after last year, I kinda figured that it would be a crap-shoot on picking brackets. Leading up to the tourney, I read a shunt-load of predictions. The range was quite vast, anywhere from the ESPN "experts" - to bloggers like me. I heard stories of the fun and creative ways that people who wanted to play, but didn't really give a shit about basketball, picked their own brackets.
One of the funnier ones, was a guy who gathered the wind speeds from each schools location on the day of the selection show, and picked them based solely on that. Not sure how he did, but I bet he did better than me.
So here are the five creative and not-so creative angles I took this season, and the final results:
Mascot Battle!: I was most excited about this one, mainly because it was so crazy...but also because I let my five year old daughter pick the winners based on mascots. It was a lot of fun to see her pick UTSA over Ohio State because the Roadrunner is so much cuter than a Buckeye. Final Score: 23 of 63 correct for 32 points.
Standard Practice: This is where I picked the games based on what I saw this season. I tried to use as much information I could, and mix it all together to get each pick. This is the method I used for the CN bracket, and as you can see...it was pretty bad. Final Score: 31 of 63 correct for 43 points
Tourist Approach: This was a wacky one, where I just picked the teams based on if I had ever personally been to that state, and then how close I had come to visiting that hometown. I'll be honest, I had to do a lot of damned research to find out where some of these schools were at! Final Score: 32 of 63 correct for 43 points
Eighth Seed Back-fill: I heard of this one just recently, and thought it was interesting. I think I heard it from a SB Nation site somewhere. The approach is to pick your Elite Eight teams first, and then just back-fill from there. Decent approach, but a little boring. Final Score: 37 of 63 correct for 53 points.
Top Seed: Just like it sounds. I picked the higher seed to win in every game. They rank the #1 seeds as well, so when it came to the final four, I picked according to that ranking. Final Score: 38 of 63 correct for 57 points.
So when it came down to it, simply picking the highest seed was the most effective practice this season. That's just plain boring, so next year I think I'll continue to get even crazier with the ways to pick teams. It sure as hell beats the way I'm doing it now.
How did you pick your bracket? Anything cool you did that worked?