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One thing that I have learned over the years is that choosing winners using emotion and sentiment rather than logic and data will greatly hinder your bracket’s success rate. For those who are serious about winning their bracket, I highly recommend avoiding that approach.

Instead, you can use data analytics as a tool for building your strongest bracket and giving you a greater chance for selecting this year’s winner.��Data analytics is the science of analyzing raw data to make conclusions about information. While it is extremely rare for someone to accurately select the winners of every single round of a tournament, using data analytics can help even the most unsophisticated basketball fan develop a fundamentally stronger bracket and improve their chances of determining the final outcome.

UMGC data analytics professor Chris Schultz offers some of his expertise and thoughts.

“Constructing a tournament bracket is somewhat like building a predictive analytics model. Your model will only be as good as the data you use to build it. But basketball stats are complex and nuanced and will require looking beyond the numbers,” says Schultz.

Selecting Useful Data ��

Shultz recommends that, before making your picks, it is important to identify criteria that you want to assess and how far back you want to go. Analyzing historical tournament data, like past team performance in the tournament, can help you identify patterns and trends that may influence how you start your selection process.

“You can look at seed rankings for a team, such as how a team has performed when it was the higher seed vs. lower seed,” says Schultz. “One can also look at the team’s scoring margins over the last 10 games before the tournament and how the team performed in previous tournaments. The good news is most of this information can be found on a number of sports websites.”

In addition to historical tournament data, it’s important to examine specific player and team statistics to assess which��ones are competing at the highest levels entering the tournament. Performance metrics such as points per game, field goal percentage, and assists-to-turnover ratio can help you identify key contributors and potential game-changers. Go back and look at what a game-changing player like Steph Curry was able to do when he took Davidson deep into the tournament or Dwayne Wade taking Marquette within reach of the finals, or in 2023 when Jordan Hawkins caught fire and brought home the championship for the UConn Huskies. And on the women’s side, the Iowa University phenom, Caitlin Clark, actually took her team all the way to the finals last year where she played against an equally strong Angel Reese at LSU.

You can also look at teams who have shown great chemistry and leadership and are playing their best basketball at the end of the season. Stats such as offensive and defensive efficiency, three-point shooting percentage, rebounding rates, and turnover margins offer valuable insights into team strengths and weaknesses. These can help you compare teams in all the potential matchups they face in the tournament.

Schultz adds, “Odds are, like everyone else’s bracket, yours will get busted before the end of the tournament—maybe even in the first round. But the process of researching teams and players, both quantitatively and qualitatively, is also a way of understanding the game a bit better and could increase your enjoyment of watching the games, whether or not your predictive analytics mesh with the results on the court.”