If you’ve never filled out a bracket for the NCAA college basketball tournament, this guide will help you greatly before entering your March Madness pool.
Every March, college basketball’s NCAA tournament takes the world by storm.
Whether you’re a die-hard hoops addict who spends half of your waking hours during the regular season watching as many games as possible or you’re someone who barely knows the basic rules of basketball, there’s a good chance you’re going to get sucked into March Madness.
Why?
The bracket.
More specifically, your bracket.
But maybe you’ve never filled out a bracket before and you’re just trying to figure out what in the world all these blank lines and numbered teams are all about. We can help you out, and offer up some general advice along the way.
What Is March Madness? The Basics
March Madness is the nickname given to the annual NCAA basketball tournament — there is both a women’s tournament and a men’s tournament, though our focus here will be on the men’s tourney — which is the drama-filled, upset-riddled, single-elimination capstone on the college basketball season where seemingly anything can happen.
From early November through early March, teams from the more than 300 Division-I schools around the U.S. play around 32 games each, hoping to prove during the regular season that they belong in the 68-team postseason field.
A little less than 50% of those 68 teams get in automatically by winning their conference tournaments played during “Championship Week,” which is the two-week period of its own single-elimination insanity conducted during the first half of March.
The rest of the field is made up of “at-large” bids, which are the ones deemed by the NCAA tournament’s selection committee as the best teams that didn’t win their conference tournaments.
Once the field is finalized and announced on Selection Sunday, let the carnage begin. It takes a little less than three weeks to whittle the vast field of hopefuls down to a singular national champion.
But you don’t need to know anything about Championship Week or the selection process—or, frankly, basketball in general—to fill out a possible winning March Madness bracket.
How to Fill Out a March Madness Bracket
1. Find a Bracket
None of these five steps is difficult, but this is the easiest of the bunch.
In that roughly 90-hour timeframe between the Selection Show on Sunday evening and the start of the Round of 64 the following Thursday morning/afternoon, it’s just about impossible to not find a bracket.
They’re everywhere, from your office, to the news, social media and very likely in your e-mail inbox from several different sources, with many companies offering incredible rewards to anyone who can beat the impossible odds by filling out a perfect bracket.
Pro Tip: Fill out at least one physical, paper bracket, because it is just so satisfying to crumple, rip and/or set that thing ablaze when your picks go horribly awry.
While there are limitless tournament pools available, both online and offline, consider giving Sleeper Bracket Mania a look. It's free to play and ad-free, provides a fully customizable experience with blazing-fast scoring, live updates, intuitive bracket navigation, modern chat, global rankings, and the ability to host up to 10,000 players in your pool.
2. Understand the Basics
The little numbers next to the team names in the bracket? Those are the seeds, and they generally reflect how good the team is. The lower the number, the better the team, at least as far as the selection committee was concerned.
In each of the four regions (East, Midwest, South and West) of the bracket, there are 16 teams seeded 1 through 16, with the first round pitting 1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, etc.
(Well, there will be 16 teams in each region once the “First Four” games have been played on and there are no longer four spots in the bracket where two team names are jammed onto a single seed line. For bracket-filling-out purposes, however, those First Four games don’t count for anything. More on those below.)
There is no re-seeding, so the winner of the 1/16 first-round game in the East Region will face the winner of the 8/9 game in the East Region. The winner of that game gets a Sweet 16 showdown with whomever comes out of the East’s 4/5/12/13 pod. And so on, and so forth.
Scoring systems can vary, but the most common one makes each of the six rounds worth 32 points, where the 32 first-round games are worth one point apiece, the 16 second-round games are two points apiece, the eight Sweet 16 games are worth four points each, the four Elite Eight games are eight points apiece, the two Final Four games are 16 each and the national championship is worth 32 for a max possible total of 192 points.
3. Try to Have At Least a Little Common Sense
Though we say anything can happen in the NCAA tournament, some things simply have not happened in the many iterations since the field first expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
For instance, there have been multiple cases now of a No. 16 seed upsetting a No. 1 seed in the first round, but we have yet to see a No. 16 seed reach the Sweet 16. Also, a 16-over-1 upset is still extremely rare.
Moreover, no team seeded No. 12 or worse has ever made it to the Final Four. And while there have been a few instances of either a No. 10 or No. 11 seed reaching a national semifinal, there have never been multiple double-digit seeded teams in the same Final Four, nor has one ever made it to the national championship game.
Lastly, dating back to 1989, all but one of the national champions was seeded No. 4 or better. No. 7 seed Connecticut in 2014 was the exception to the rule.
If you want to primarily base your picks on mascots, jersey colors or something equally unrelated to how good the teams actually are, you do you. But if you’ve got a No. 14 seed winning it all or the sum of your seeds in the Final Four is greater than 30, just don’t expect to win your pool.
4. Come Up with a Strategy (Optional)
We just mentioned mascots and jersey colors as two of the sort of nonsensical strategies for filling out a bracket, but there are countless methods you could use.
The best method is to watch a ton of college basketball for four months, know the teams inside and out and have a good sense of who matches up well with whom.
But let’s assume you don’t have the time or bandwidth to make that happen, but you’d still like to have a realistic chance at winning your bracket pool. Here are two pool-winning strategies that are time-tested:
The Weighted Coin-Flip Bracket
Some people will do a straight up coin-flip bracket, filling in the entire thing in a matter of 63 flips. That is pure lunacy, though, liable to result in multiple 16 seeds reaching the Final Four in a bracket that almost immediately ends up in the garbage.
In a weighted coin-flip bracket, however, the seed dictates how many times you need to flip that side of the coin in order to advance the team. For example, in a 6-vs.-11 first-round matchup, your pick depends on whether you flip six heads or 11 tails first.
You do end up with a lot of 1 and 2 seeds in the Elite Eight, but you also end up with more upsets than you might expect.
Make sure to stretch your thumbs before you start, though. You’ll be flipping that coin at least 200 times; probably closer to 500.
AMOV x CRPI
AMOV represents average margin of victory. CRPI is conference ratings percentage index.
RPI used to be the primary sorting metric the selection committee used in selecting and seeding the field, but it was replaced by NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool) a few years ago. There are still sites that track conference RPI, though, and scoring margin is a readily accessible statistic.
Pop those numbers into a spreadsheet, multiply them together for each team and advance the team in each matchup that has the greatest product of AMOV x CRPI.
The combination of acronyms and multiplication makes this one sound way more complicated than it is. It only takes like 15 minutes, and it usually fares pretty well.
6. Let ‘Er Rip
If you take the time to come up with a strategy, awesome.
If not, that’s cool, too.
The only real rule of it all is that you must fill out your entire bracket before the first game of the first round is played on Thursday.
This makes it painfully possible that your pick to win the national championship gets eliminated on the first day of the tournament. But this is why you’re going to want that paper copy of your bracket to destroy.
Essential March Madness Terms to Know
Cinderellas and Sleepers
Two terms referring to underdogs that are often used interchangeably, but shouldn’t be.
A Cinderella is a team that emerges from seemingly nowhere to win a couple of games; a no-name school dancing in glass slippers. Once upon a time, Gonzaga was a Cinderella story. More recent versions include George Mason (2006), Florida Gulf Coast (2013) and Saint Peter’s (2022).
A Sleeper (not to be confused with, uh, us), on the other hand, is any team that might/does win more games than it was supposed to for the seed it received. Like in 2021 when UCLA went from First Four to Final Four as a No. 11 seed, or in 2016 when Syracuse made it to the Final Four as a No. 10 seed. Neither of those long-established major-conference programs can be considered a Cinderella, but they were definitely sleepers.
The Big Dance
A nickname for the NCAA tournament, first linked to former Marquette head coach Al McGuire. When asked whether he would be wearing his trademark lucky attire to the 1977 NCAA tournament, McGuire said, “You gotta wear the blue blazer when you go to the Big Dance.” (Marquette won the Big Dance that year.)
The Bubble
There’s usually not a ton of Bubble talk once the NCAA tournament begins, but up until Selection Sunday, the Bubble is the oft-discussed, ever-changing collection of good-not-great teams that may or may not get into the Big Dance as an at-large team.
Round-by-Round Nomenclature
- First Four — The NCAA doesn’t like it when we call these the “play-in games,” but it’s how pretty much the entire world views them. It’s made up of two games on the Tuesday and two games on the Wednesday after Selection Sunday that pits the four worst automatic bids and the four worst at-large bids against each other before the tournament really gets underway.
- First Round — The 32 games played on Thursday and Friday that are to blame for a tremendous amount of lost productivity at companies around the country.
- Second Round — The 16 games played on the first Saturday and Sunday, which are sort of the bridge between the initial wall-to-wall chaos and the latter stages of the tournament.
- Sweet 16 — The 16 teams who survive the first weekend. After a several-day hiatus for all of us to recover from the whirlwind of the first two rounds, there are four regional semifinals (Sweet 16 games) on each of Thursday night and Friday night.
- Elite Eight — The eight teams who make it through the first half of the tournament. This is typically the point in March Madness where everyone starts declaring that seeding no longer matters and that anyone still dancing could win it all. There are two regional finals (Elite Eight games) played on each of Saturday and Sunday.
- Final Four and National Championship (or Natty or Title Game) — Six days after the last game of the Elite Eight, the four remaining teams and many, many fans gather in a football stadium to crown a champion. The Final Four includes two games on Saturday night before it all comes down to Monday’s title bout.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has anyone ever filled out a perfect bracket?
No, and it’s pretty unlikely anyone ever will.
Your odds of winning the Powerball jackpot with one ticket are 1 in 292.2 million. Your odds of winning the Powerball jackpot two times in a row with just one ticket purchased each time are 1 in 85.4 quadrillion (8.54 x 10^16). And if you assume every game in the NCAA tournament is 50/50, your odds of filling out a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion (9.2 x 10^18—or roughly 100 times worse than your odds of twice winning the Powerball jackpot.
We’ll keep trying, though.
How is the NCAA tournament bracket built?
Painstakingly and clandestinely.
The selection committee is made up of 12 athletic directors and conference commissioners from around the country, and they go through a multiple-day process of selecting and seeding the 68 teams based on win quality, schedule strength, efficiency ratings and all sorts of data points.
Once the overall seed list is set, geography and a set of rules about when in the tournament regular-season rematches are allowed to occur determine how the teams are assigned to each region and sub-region.
Is there any sort of second-chance bracket if mine gets destroyed on day one?
Surprisingly, this has never caught on.
The window of time between when the field is announced and the start of the first game of the first round is almost identical to how much time passes between the end of the second round and the start of the Sweet 16. However, second-chance bracket pools that begin with the Sweet 16 just haven’t become a widespread thing.
For what it’s worth, though, your odds of correctly picking those final 15 games of the tournament are 1-in-32,768.
Join the Excitement with Sleeper’s Bracket Mania!
Now that you know a little something about the NCAA tournament and filling out a bracket, it’s time to jump aboard Sleeper’s Bracket Mania bandwagon.
In Bracket Mania, you’ll get to read little blurbs about each of the teams in the tournament field, in case you need any stats, help or just the occasional chuckle while filling out your bracket.
Once the tournament has begun and entries are locked in, Sleeper takes care of marking all those winners and losers while you use the in-app chat for bragging rights and/or sob stories about where it all went wrong.
You can have up to 10,000 participants in your bracket pool, or make it private and just keep it to a small group of friends. Either way, you can see throughout the tournament where your bracket ranks globally. All you need is the Sleeper app on your phone.
