2025 Bracket Picking Guide
General Guidelines
Every year the internet is awash with articles describing how to pick the perfect March Madness bracket. Most of these articles will discuss some trends of past champions. For example, you’ll hear a lot of people say this year not to pick Auburn because they’ve lost 3 of their last 4 games.
I think that these articles are largely useless because they fundamentally misunderstand the goal of filling out a bracket. Your goal in filling out a bracket is not to predict what is going to happen, but rather to maximize your chances of winning your bracket pool. If you wanted to maximize the expected score of your bracket, you would just pick the Vegas favorite to win every single game and you would end up with a bracket comfortably around 70th percentile.
That sort of strategy will guarantee that you don’t come in last, but it also guarantees you won’t come in first. To maximize your chances of coming in first in your bracket pool, you need to know the answers to the following two questions:
-How big is your bracket pool?
As a general rule of thumb, if you are trying to win an n person pool, you need to finish with a bracket that is in the top 1/n of brackets. To put that in other terms, if you are trying to win a 10,000 person pool, you have to finish in the top 0.01% of brackets. If you are trying to win a 5 person pool, you only have to finish in the top 20% of brackets. If you want to win a big pool you need to shoot for the moon. If you want to win a small pool you can be much more conservative.
-Who is everyone else picking?
Filling out a bracket is all about finding value. As I’ll explain below, with limited exceptions, you only have a realistic shot of winning your pool if you select the correct champion. Let’s use Duke as an example. The Blue Devils have around a 20% chance of winning the national title. If they’re being picked in 80% of brackets, there’s no point in picking Duke- you will need to nail the rest of your bracket to beat out the scores of others who picked them. If they’re only being picked in 5% of brackets, they’re a great pick- you have a ⅕ chance of getting the national champion correct and only have to beat out a few other people who picked them.
Bracket Scoring
The rest of this post assumes that you are using a standard bracket scoring system. The standard scoring system gives 10 points for a correct first round selection, 20 points for a correct second round selection, and 40, 80, 160 and 320 points for the subsequent rounds. ESPN, CBS and Yahoo all use this system. In practice, what this means is that almost every bracket with the correct champion will finish ahead of almost every bracket with an incorrect champion.
In medium to large formats, the ideal strategy is to pick an unconventional (but underpicked) champion and then go with largely safe picks elsewhere. This allows you to both capture the value in an underpicked team and also puts you in a good position to beat out anyone else who picked the same team. Feel free to pick early round upsets as well- if you want to pick some random 15 seed for fun, it’s only 10 points and it’s very unlikely to move the needle when compared to the 320 points you get for selecting the right champion.
Who to pick this year?
We’ve now established that your primary goal should be to pick a team as your champion whose true odds of winning the tournament are greater than the rate at which they’re being selected to win the tournament. How do we go about estimating these two quantities?
To estimate each team’s odds of winning the tournament, I used betting markets to estimate each team’s chances. For the men’s tournament I also present a team’s chances as calculated as an average of 3 computer models (those models being Ken Pomeroy’s, Bart Torvik’s and Kelley Ford’s), if you prefer to use that instead.
I found data from ESPN and Yahoo as to who the public is picking in their brackets and used that for the second half of the equation.
The “Edge” column below is simply calculated as the % of public picks minus the betting market implied probability.
So who should you pick as your champion this year? There are lots of good options. If you’re trying to win a small pool (up to 30 people), I like going with Auburn or Houston. It’s rare to see the #1 overall seed be underpicked, but the Tigers faltered down the stretch and I think that scared too many people off. Houston is a better choice if you are going by the computer average, but this is bolstered by Torvik being unusually high on them. The Cougars have also been better liked by computers than betting markets for a few years in a row now.
If you are trying to win a medium-sized pool (30-100 people) you might want to go a bit further afield. Texas Tech, Iowa State, Maryland and Arizona are all intriguing options. If you are trying to win a large pool (100+ people), Gonzaga is a good option.
I know a lot of people (myself included) like to join extremely large (10,000 people or so) pools that often are free to enter and have cash prizes. St. Mary’s and Missouri look like the best picks in those formats.
In the women’s tournament this year, there are two clear frontrunners in South Carolina and UConn, and then a clear next tier of 4. There are plenty of reasonable picks here- I think I will probably go with Texas or Notre Dame. If you’re trying to win a bigger women’s pool this year, Kansas State is a great pick.
Lastly, I’ll look at each region in the tournament to identify some good Final Four picks. I generally like to make Final Four picks that are a bit more conventional than my champion pick.
Men’s Regions
Auburn is a very reasonable pick. If you want to pick someone else, Michigan State does not present much value, but plenty of other teams in this region do- I particularly like Iowa State.
Duke is pretty strongly overpicked. If you want to pick chalk because you’re picking a crazy national champion, I get that. However, if you want to pick a dark horse to make the Final Four, this is a good region to do it. Arizona and BYU both catch my eye.
Houston is a very reasonable pick. They had the misfortune of drawing a likely matchup with 8 seed Gonzaga in the second round, who is in the top 10 in all of the computers. I like the Zags as a sleeper pick, along with Illinois.
Again, I couldn’t fault you for taking Florida who is a coin flip to make the Final Four. I could fault you for taking St. John’s, who is being picked at several times the rate of Texas Tech and Maryland despite having similar odds of making the Final Four.
Women’s Regions
Generally you’re best off picking mostly chalk in the women’s bracket, but this wouldn’t be a bad region to pick an upset. UCLA has some real competition here, I think I will pick NC State here.
South Carolina is slightly overpicked but there’s no clear second contender here. I think I will likely go with them anyways just for lack of a better option.
If you follow my advice from earlier, you’ve probably picked either Texas or Notre Dame as your national champion already so you know who you’re picking to make the Final Four from this region. Notre Dame was inexplicably given a 3 seed by the committee despite being a top 6 team all season.
2 seed UConn will be significantly favored over 1 seed USC in a hypothetical Elite Eight matchup and that makes them an easy pick from this region, considering that they’re being picked at the same rate.
Good luck with your brackets this year!