March Madness (OK, borderline insanity)

On Sundays, I have the girls pick numbers, from 1 to 4, for bathtime. I usually mix up the order so that it keeps them on their toes about who goes in what order. On Sunday, I tossed #1 & #4 in together, and #2 & #3 in together, tourney style...

Today I filled in a bracket for the annual work contest. (The prize, bragging rights for a full year.) After filling in the bracket, I started thinking about the bracket. Then I decided to line up 6 brackets, like the cards you'd see in front of a little old lady in a Bingo hall. (I don't think I know any bingo playing old ladies, right? Tara tells me I missed a Sunday School lesson recently where they talked about trying to not give offense to people. When referring to myself, I sometimes say "The patient is rejecting the transplant"...)

Anyway, after the work bracket, I created a "Coin Flip" bracket. It had several 16 seeds going to the Elite Eight. I guess that is what happens when you flip coins.

The 3rd bracket involved something I called "Seed difference less than 8, take the underdog." Meaning 5 vs 12, take the 12; and 8 vs 9, take the 9. It turns out that there were 16 upsets in the 1st round, then all the higher seeded teams won after that. The final 4 was the 4 number one teams. Not all that interesting of a bracket, really.

For the 4th bracket, I created a bracket that had BYU, Maryland, UCLA, and North Carolina all make the final four. (The winner? BYU over Maryland. Sorry Darren.)

While thinking about the 5th bracket, I decided that the coin flip really didn't do much for giving the higher seeded teams any advantange. I decided to do another randomization, with a bit of a weight to it. I created a table of 32 random numbers 1 to 16. If the seeding was separated by 7, like the 5-12 seed game, I used the 7, with 11 to 5 odds. If the random number was 8, the higher seeded team was picked. If the number was 13 (above 11), the underdog was picked. By this time, as you can see, I had too much time on my hands.

(Sorry about the blank space here. I'm not sure what I did to end up with it.)

15 - 15 to 1	7 - 11 to 5
14 - 15 to 1	6 - 10 to 6
13 - 14 to 2	5 - 10 to 6
12 - 14 to 2	4 - 9 to 7
11 - 13 to 3	3 - 9 to 7
10 - 13 to 3	2 - 8 to 8
9 - 12 to 4	1 - 8 to 8
8 - 12 to 4

I think the "Random #" bracket turned out fairly interesting, and I would have used it had it not gotten 15th seeded North Texas into the Elite 8... (Click on the bracket to see it closer.)

Having created 5 brackets, I needed just one more to fill out my Bingo slate. I decided to combine the brackets into one. (2.5 with non-forced picks by me, 2 in different types of random picks, it could happen, right?) For this 6th bracket, I took the team picked most often in that slot from the other 5 brackets, and used them. If it was a tie, I took the higher seed. (Several slots ended up with just one available vote, several were tied at one.) I think the results were pretty good, and posted it on the work pool as having been done by the girls. I will let you know if they win.