I’m jealous of Matthew Zimmerman, because his job title at Virginia Tech is: assistant professor of sports media analytics.
Schools teach this now?
No fair; coming up in the 1990s, we had to figure things out on our own.
To wit: my college roommate and I, one year, on a road trip to the ACC Tournament, decided, between games, to try to pick and then seed the NCAA Tournament field.
What we had at our disposal: the Friday USA Today sports section, which had the Sagarin ratings.
Seriously, that was all we had to work with.
We got 62 of the 64 teams that got bids right; we were somewhere in the 30s in terms of getting the seeds right.
Now you can take classes in this.
I need a lawyer.
The media-relations folks down at Tech reached out to present us Zimmerman, I guess as a humble-brag – look what we’ve got that you don’t have there at UVA.
Zimmerman weighed in with some thoughts on how you should approach your brackets.
Best advice: keep in mind that early upsets are par for the course in the men’s tournament, while the women’s games tend to go a bit chalky.
“But it should be noted that once the men’s tournament gets past the first weekend, the later rounds usually shake out with maybe one lower-seeded interloper among the expected survivors,” Zimmerman said.
Basically, in your men’s bracket, go with your gut on early upsets; with the women, there isn’t going to be a 1-16 upset anytime soon, if ever.
In terms of favorites, you can’t go wrong on the women’s side sticking with one and two seeds for your Final Four.
On the men’s side, the top two seeds – Duke and Michigan – are where they are because they had, by heads and shoulders, the best resumes, but both are dealing with late-season injury issues that could jump up and bite them in the second weekend.
That could leave the door open for Florida, last year’s champ, or Arizona, “which won the Pac-12‘s last national title in 1997, and is a popular pick to take one for the Big 12 this season,” Zimmerman said.
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Chris Graham
