We tried out a different version of our family March Madness pool this year. Since the traditional fill-out-a-bracket method is , we thought we should shake it up and try a new method to track the craziness. This year we tried the Bill James Bracketless Bracket method.
Rules:
Everyone picks their favorite #1 seed, then their favorite #2 seed, all the way down the line. This creates a "ballot" that is almost guaranteed to be unique, and now you have 16 favorite teams to cheer for. Every time your team on the one-seed line wins a game at any point in the tournament, you get 100 points. Every time your 2-seed wins, you get 110 points. And the pattern continues for each seed. If your 16 seed wins a game (Both Drew and Ellie's did!), you get 250 points. At the end of the tournament, the person with the most points wins.
Here are the ballots:
Drew and Claire both picked UMBC, but no one picked this year’s tournament darling Loyola-Illinois as their 11 seed (200 points per win). Since they got to the Final Four, that guess certainly would have paid off.
I created a spreadsheet to calculate the scores and standings and would send out updates after each round to the family via our group iMessage chat. It ended up being pretty fun even though I quickly became the laughing stock of the family due to my very poor ballot.
After the second round, I was down to only a few teams left and Drew was in the lead.
But, after all was said and done, Manina pulled out a pretty comfortable victory, having assured the top spot by the time the tournament got down to the Final Four.
Maybe next year we’ll try the squares method or something.
MightyJohnsons 