By: Katelyn Griffin

The Super Bowl of basketball, March Madness is where people go up against their families, friends, or even coworkers to win the bracket pool.

Run by the NCAA, college basketball teams compete to win “the bracket,” and many people around the country fill out their predictions on how they think it’s going to go and which team is going to win it all. The person with the most wins and the highest score wins either money or bragging rights. 

How do people fill out the bracket? Do they just guess? Do they use a strategy, like the history of the team or the stats?

Filling out multiple brackets is a common practice. Senior Zac Hansen filled out two brackets. One was for his Stats class and one was in a pool with his friends.

“The two brackets that I filled out were very different because of the different strategies I used,” Hansen said. “When I was filling out the one for my class, multiple of the bad teams got very far because of how high their data was on some of the stuff, and that’s because of the difficulty of their earlier schedules.”

So maybe the data and the stats of the team might not always mean they are better. “It’s definitely more than just the stats of the team,” Hansen said. “It’s about knowing how good they are and what teams they have gone against in the past.”

Senior Emme Volmer had a different method. “I just looked at the team’s past schedule and their rank overall,” Volmer said. “I watch a good amount of basketball to know roughly which teams are good and which ones are not as good.”

Did their strategies actually work? “My personal bracket did far better than my school one, because I used a better strategy,” Hansen said. “I didn’t win but I think I did pretty good.”

“I got in the top three out of all of my friends’ brackets,” Volmer said. “So I definitely think the way that I filled it out was pretty good.”

This year’s men’s tournament ended with the University of Florida Gators beating the University of Houston Cougars 65-63.