From the Office of Weak Sauce Management: Your Elite 8 Scoring Update

As we mentioned after the Round 2 update, our scoring rules this year did absolutely nothing to discourage most of you from submitting chalky brackets. And while we’ll do a deep dive after all the dancing is done, right now there’s a simple piece of evidence that strongly supports the notion that March Madness pools everywhere are plagued by herd mentality: the frequency of teams in our challenge selected to win the championship.

Yes, 39 of our 70 brackets chose 1 seeds, and fully 61 brackets waded no deeper than a 3 seed.

In a sense, I get it.  Even if you picked Rhode Island for the first round upset, you’d have to be insane to have them in the Final Four.  But the thing is, the championship picks are indicative of the tone of our 4,410 overall picks; most people shaded towards higher seeds most of the time.

And then there’s this: Assuming a top-seeded team wins the championship, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that it’s unlikely to be worth more than 25 points total.  At the other end of the spectrum, Xavier is worth 34 points and South Carolina is worth 48 points right now.

This is not to say that it’s easier to find teams that will go on an unanticipated tear.  To the contrary, the cumulative probabilities imply that it’s more difficult. But there are two high-point mid-seeded teams, and there will be only one champion.

Still, very few people went looking for Cinderellas, for we are a nothing if not subject to the herd.

And now, on to the scoreboard: