Win Your Office NCAA Pool With Shameless Geekery

Chances are your office has an NCAA March Madness pool. And you want to win it. You want to win it bad. Now there are a couple of different ways to do this: blindly selecting random teams, basing your picks on the squad that has the best uniforms/ hair/ mascot, etc. But you're a geek and maybe have a little flair for math so you're going to do it all scientific-like. Yup, there's a lot of different formulas and methods out there for selecting NCAA brackets, but is there a sure-fire way to pick a w1nnar?

WIRED Senior Editor (and sports maniac) Mark McClusky has the answer. His advice? Play your pool like a stockbroker. with a high risk/ high reward system. He explains in great detail on his blog:

So, how do you do that? I’ve used the team rankings from the indefatigable Ken Pomeroy, the dean of college basketball stats geeks. Pomeroy’s ratings use the concept of offensive and defensive efficiency?—?how good they are at scoring each time they have the ball, and how good they are at stopping the other team from scoring on each possession?—?to come up with a theoretical winning percentage (Read much more about Ken’s ratings at his blog).

The idea is that you have a more objective view of a teams strengths and weaknesses, isolated from all the factors like the quality of their competition, where the games are played, their luck, etc. No statistical system is perfect, but Ken’s is pretty darn good, and seems like the best place to start.

There's a lot more to it than that. You can read up on the rest of McClusky's methodology here. We'll update this post periodically throughout the month to see how accurate his predictions are.