My Bracket (2011)

Here is what I entered into the Yahoo! VW pool (free to enter, $200 to the winner):

(click to enlarge)

I do not think Kentucky is the best team in the country.

We'll get to that in a minute though. Let's start with the first round. We're not using any upset scoring, so I mostly picked favorites (as in the spread, not superior seeds) on Thursday and Friday. The only exceptions were:

- Clemson: Two-point underdog to WVU, but only 14% of Yahoo! entrants are picking them, and I can't resist the opportunity to be trailing 86% of the field by 2pm on Thursday.

- Missouri: Only +102/-113 at Pinny, and 66% are picking 6-seed Cincy.

- Gonzaga: +1.5 at Pinny against another Big East team I think is pretty overrated, with 64% of Yahoo taking the Red Storm.

That's it. Very exciting I know.

And if you thought my Thursday-Friday picks were boring, my weekend is even worse. I didn't want to have an all-chalk Sweet 16, but I failed to find a compelling reason otherwise. It's usually easy to sneak one or two 5s in there, but not this year, with an absurdly strong crop of fours against five seeds which are favored by 2, 2.5, 2.5, and 5.5 in the first round, respectively. The 6 line doesn't bring much hope either, as the only one I'd have any interest in is Georgetown with a healthy Wright, and there's no way I'm picking Purdue to lose in the second round. I thought about taking U Dub to stun UNC, but eventually decided against it.

Luckily the rest of the my bracket is all over the place, so I'm not too worried about the chalky S16. My strategy here was based on the fact that I'm entering a pool with 183 members (and counting!), so I needed to clearly differentiate my bracket in a reasonable fashion, Well, I happen to think that two of the top eight or so teams in the country are #4 seeds, so that seemed like a good place to start.

The four most popular picks to win the title in the Yahoo! bracket are the #1 seeds, which is certainly reasonable. After that though, you have to go through five more teams before getting to Kentucky and Texas, the 10th and 11th most popular choices, respectively (at least they're above Florida, I suppose). From there it was a fairly arbitrary decision between the two, but I like UK's first round draw a bit better (they're favored by 13, vs. 10 for the Longhorns), and would actually prefer to play tOSU rather than Duke in the S16. So I went with the young but exceedingly talented Wildcats beating UT in the national semis.

It was fairly straightforward from there. UNC or Syracuse is another one that is close to a toss-up, so I took the less popular Orange. Everybody is in love with the Fighting Kembas, but I am not, so SDSU was an easy E8 selection there. I'm not high on this ND team at all, and like Purdue more than most, so no problem there. The bottom half of the Southeast bracket is so horrible that it's too painful to take anyone other than UF, and Pitt is clearly superior to the Gators. Kansas is easily the team I like the most on the right side of the bracket, and I already have my "crazy" F4 picks on the left side, so I had no problem taking the #1 seed and second most popular team in the tournament to reach the title game.

As noted, I think you can easily make an argument for taking Texas in a pool of this size. For a smaller pool, I think Duke and KU are solid choices, as the Buckeyes are receiving more hype than is probably warranted.

Good luck with your brackets. Live chat will start around noon EST.