If You Fill Out 9.2 Quintillion Brackets, One of Them's Got to stick.

I didn't have time to fill out 9.2 Quintillion Brackets, but I did have time to get 4 of them done, thereby increasing my odds significantly from a paltry 1 in 9.2 Quintillion to a much more respectable 1 in 2.3 Quintillion.

So my first bracket was just me shooting from the hip, not really thinking about anything, having only the basketball knowledge I have acquired from listening to sports radio in intermittent  chunks.  I think most of my picks were made based on moments from past tournaments I could remember, uniform color, and....well, probably not much else.  It took me about two minutes:

Now that the the media markets are flooded with braketology, I have learned that this is probably not a very smart bracket.  Syracuse, reeling and limping along, probably won't get as far as I have predicted. Creighton, apparently, is also a poor choice to get to the final.  But I like the name so I stuck with it.  Creighton.  What a great name for a University.  

VCU also is going far, very far, probably too far.  Likewise, personal bias keeps me from having Virginia break into the elite eight.  Should have no problem, though, getting to the thumpin' thirty two.

Next we have a bracket based on a metric I tried to develop.  I basically took RPI, Strength of Schedule, and percent of games won in last 10 (the HF, or Hottness Factor), added a few more mathematical herbs and spices, and came up with the Bracket Optimization Regression Analysis Tool (BORAT), which ranked all teams on a scale of 252.5397 to 253.6406.  I worked my way through the bracket based on the different BORAT scores for the different teams and came up with my purely mathematical entry:

The nice thing about the BORAT is that will actually predict upsets.  Harvard, in particular, seems to be poised for a pretty spectacular run.  Of course the flaw with the BORAT is that, because there is a pretty strong correlation between BORAT and ceeding, the final four is made up of 1 and 2 cedes and past history shows that this is fairly unlikely.  

So I took the first round based on the BORAT and then, reasoning that because any given team can beat any other on any given day from the first round on, I flipped a coin for the rest of the match-ups.  Thus my third bracket was born:

It seems kind of sort of plausible, though I'd be surprised St. Joe's makes it the elite 8 (or is it the great 8?).  Ditto for Gonzaga, the perennial Cinderella Team of my youth.  The University may be Jesuit in make-up but I have lost faith in them when it comes to getting out of the first round (the Sexy Sixty-Four?).  

So, finally, I submitted my "Sheet of Integrity", the one bracket that I would use to enter the office pool.  I basically started with the first round BORAT, made some adjustments, and tried to think through the rest of the bracket with the limited knowledge I had gained after looking at the different teams while filling out the other brackets.  This is what I got:

Clearly, I still love Creighton, for no reason what so ever.  

I had planned to take in my final so called Sheet of Integrity to the Newport News Candy Factory the following day, but I forgot it.  So I once again filled out another bracket, a fifth bracket, a secret bracket, shooting off the hip.  

So we'll see how it goes.  I think that Warren Buffet should probably start writing that check...I hope he gives me one of those giant checks.  I'd like to walk into a bank with one of those.  

Good luck all!  Happy Tournament Time!