The beginning of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament – or March Madness, as it’s more commonly known – is as sure a sign of spring as warmer weather, longer days, and changing clocks. The annual tournament features 68 of America’s best teams vying for the biggest prize in college basketball, a national championship. To earn that and the right to “cut down the nets”, they have to survive a six-round single-elimination tournament held across the nation. One loss, and you’re out.
For those sitting on the couch instead of competing on the court, the tournament provides an alternative competition: creating brackets. Making a tournament bracket gives fans an easy way to make tournament predictions and compare them with their friends.
This year, we’ve created a 2023 March Madness Bracket workbook for you to log predictions of your own. Create a copy of the workbook to make your own picks and compare them with ours, and check back in with our live workbook throughout the tournament, updated daily with game results.
Read on to learn more about the not-so-scientific discipline of “bracketology”.
March Madness may be a college basketball tournament, but bracketology – the art of creating predictive tournament brackets – isn’t just for college students or basketball fans.
It’s estimated that last year, 36.5 million people – around 10% of the US population – created a March Madness bracket. To put that number into perspective, that’s almost twice the number of college students in the US and more than 15 times the average number of viewers for a regular season NBA game.
Even if each of those 36.5 million people created a unique bracket, they’d only cover 0.0000000004% of the possible bracket combinations. That’s because there are more than 9.2 quintillion bracket possibilities, or as many seconds as there are in 292 billion years.
If you know a thing or two about college basketball and make informed bracket decisions, your odds improve to about 1 in 120 billion – or, a few orders of magnitude worse than the odds of winning the lottery. So don’t sweat your picks, because your bracket is sure to be busted anyways.
There’s no “right” way to fill your bracket, and the odds are stacked against you even with a well-researched bracket modeled after the experts’. But there are a few things to keep in mind as you fill yours out.
First and foremost, don’t just take the higher seed in the matchup. March Madness is famous for its upsets and “Cinderella stories” – low-seeded teams that make a deep run in the tournament. It’s tempting to pick the higher-seeded team for each matchup, but this is a surefire way to have your bracket busted on Day 1. In this tournament, there is no impossible, only improbable.
Next, go with your gut. You could read dozens of articles and tournament guides from experts and model your bracket after statistically-likely outcomes, but sometimes it’s best to trust your gut feeling. Maybe there’s a team that you have a good feeling about regardless of the conventional wisdom surrounding their odds. Sometimes, the numbers do lie.
Finally, creating a bracket is more fun when you can compare yours to others. Put together a bracket pool with your friends and family for some friendly competition, and compare brackets with one another as the tournament progresses. Use Spreadsheet.com’s sharing and collaboration features to share your bracket with friends or on social media.
Our 2023 March Madness Bracket workbook is the perfect place to make your own picks and follow the tournament as it happens. The workbook has four worksheets:
Use the new Zoom functionality to zoom in and out of your bracket, and check out Spreadsheet.com’s OpenAI integration in the Teams worksheet, where we’ve asked OpenAI to return the locations of all of the schools in the tournament.
Make a copy of our workbook to create your own bracket, and check back in with our live workbook throughout the tournament to view game results updated daily.
March Madness begins Thursday, March 16 at 12:15 PM EST with a matchup between No. 9 Maryland and No. 8 West Virginia on CBS.
