Who REALLY Has the Easiest Bracket? By the Numbers
Published March 16, 2011 | 
Every year when March rolls around people start frantically absorbing information and filling out their brackets. A lot of people base which #1 seeds are a lock to advance to the Elite 8 and Final Four on who has the easiest bracket.
So who really does have the easiest bracket?
Fans Opinion on Twitter’
Before we take a look at actual statistics and numbers, let’s look at the oblivious fan to see where their heads are. A simple search for “Easiest Bracket” on the twitter search provides some quick and interesting results.
On a relatively small sample size of 50, the results are pretty surprising. It was pretty obvious that everyone thinks either Duke (West) or Pitt (Southeast) have the easiest bracket. The term “Easiest bracket of all time” was used on at least half of all tweets involving those two teams.
The “Duke has the easiest bracket” tweets almost all involved saying they have the easiest bracket every year, or littered with some sort of NCAA conspiracy theory. Typical Duke haters, which probably mean they KNEW Duke had the easiest road before ever looking at a bracket.
That probably just shows that the bias of the sample due to Duke haters (probably 55% of America) makes this data irrelevant and with very little thought involved. Either way, here’s the data:
| Duke | Pitt | OSU | Kansas |
|---|---|---|---|
| West | Southeast | East | Southwest |
| 21 | 24 | 1 | 4 |
Now The Data
There are a few ways to look at the strength of each bracket. I decided to look at the total strength of all 16 seeds, and then to look at the overall strength of the top 5 seeds. Continue reading
Cinderella Ratings Problem For CBS/NCAA
Published March 23, 2010 | 
Cinderella’s are all the story and all the hype in the NCAA tournament right now. We’ve got #12 seed Cornell, #9 Northern Iowa who took down #1 seed Kansas. St. Mary’s is still around.
Now, watching the underdog Cinderella take down the big guys is awesome to watch (sometimes even when it’s at the expense of our bracket pools). ”The Sandman” Samham for St. Mary’s and Farokmanesh for Northern Iowa were my two favorite stars of the last round of the tournament. But these guy’s still being around could be at huge expense to the NCAA and CBS. Continue reading
Duke-NCAA Conspiracy Theory
Published March 16, 2010 | 
There has been a lot of talk about how Duke has the easiest road to the Final Four in Indianapolis, and Kansas, the overall #1 seed, has one of the hardest. Duke has the most losses of the #1 seeds (5), all of which were on the road. Duke was also given the play-in game. Disregard the play-in game, since the first game for #1 seeds is always a joke, #1 has never been beaten in the first round. Kansas, Kentucky, and Duke all won their conferences and conference tournaments.
Here’s where the conspiracy theorists come into play. The NCAA is in its final 3 years of its lucrative TV contract with CBS (11 years, 6.1 billion). They can opt out after this tournament. They want another huge contract from either CBS or ESPN/ABC if they can match the CBS bid. CBS is losing money on the NCAA’s just like NBC lost money on the Winter Olympics ($250 million). So the NCAA wants to make sure ratings are huge this year to make sure CBS bids high and ESPN/ABC is drooling for the opportunity. It’s also the same reason the NCAA is considering adding 31 teams to the NCAA field to expand it to 96. Money. Big Money.
So why Duke?
Duke is ratings gold. Duke has always been ratings gold. There is never controversy with the Continue reading