How to (not) pick your March Madness bracket

0.

That's the number of losses in my bracket when I gave up hope on concluding that I picked a good bracket.

I picked the winner in each of the first seven games. However, Harvard lost to Vanderbilt, which in hindsight, doesn't surprise me. (Editor's Note: I typed up this post as Harvard was making a comeback in the second half, which was the reason for the zero losses at the time of the blog post.) What DOES surprise me is that I had Vanderbilt losing in the first round, coming off an SEC Conference Tournament win, where they beat Kentucky in the championship. Seriously? I picked them to lose? What the hell. In the wake of this horrible decision, I'm going to create some rules to follow if you don't want a bad bracket. Unfortunately, this won't be applicable until next year, but hey - never too early to start for next year.

ps. I say horrible because I had Harvard in my Elite 8. More on why that was a bad decision soon.

• Good teams make it to the playoffs. Hot teams win them.
• See: St. Louis Cardinals, UConn Huskies, Dallas Mavericks, New York Giants, Boston Bruins.
• If you pick a favorite as your champion (Kentucky, UNC), be prepared to need to win the first few rounds. If you fall behind early, you won't be able to overtake the teams with the same champion as you.
• DON'T pick a favorite as your champion.
• You have a better chance picking a team that no one else has in your group to win the championship (Duke, Michigan St., Syracuse, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio St.) than to win 28 of the 32 first round games, or 14 of the 16 second round games.
• Root for your favorite team because you like them, not because you picked them to win.
• I.e., don't pick your favorite team to win unless they can legitimately win the tournament.
• Follow the status quo.
• If you don't make any high-risk, high-reward decisions (like putting Harvard in the Elite 8), then you can't hurt yourself, and if you have that one-shot winner like Michigan St., Duke, etc., you'll put yourself in a position to win.

Follow these rules and you'll be in a decent position to win your pool next year. Until then, good luck on this year's brackets, enjoy the madness, and, above all, go Duke.