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" Millions of us Americans come in droves each year to predict the results of the NCAA tourney, and we&amp;#039;re all shockingly bad at it. Last year, 8.15 million brackets were filled out on ESPN.com, and just 47 of them predicted a perfect Final Four. Forty-seven. This year, there&amp;#039;s a Quicken Loans Billion-Dollar Bracket Challenge on Yahoo! Sports, with $1 billion being offered to anyone who can fill out a perfect bracket. Why so much? Because it will never happen. It&amp;#039;s an empty gesture \u2014 even if Quicken Loans were bankrupt (and they&amp;#039;re definitely not in this economy), they could make the offer. In short, filling out a bracket is a wonderful but futile exercise \u2014 one that you&amp;#039;re going to do anyway. Since you probably don&amp;#039;t have an encyclopedic knowledge of this year&amp;#039;s coaches and players (which probably wouldn&amp;#039;t help you anyway), that leaves only knowledge gleaned from history. So, what can be gleaned from March Madness tournaments past? We&amp;#039;re glad you asked.  1. Which games really are toss-ups? Which ones can you just close your eyes and pick? For our purposes here, a toss-up is going to mean a game between two different seeds in which one of the teams has no greater than a 60 percent chance of winning. (It also has had to happen at least 25 times \u2014 you shouldn&amp;#039;t get too worked up over the fact that 11-seeds have beaten 1-seeds three out of five times throughout tournament history \u2014 it&amp;#039;s statistically insignificant, and that matchup and others like it are rare for a reason.) But there are seven match-ups that do fit those parameters, all of which have the better seed winning a majority of the time: Opening round games:   8- vs. 9-seeds: Unsurprisingly the most unpredictable. The 8-seed wins just over 51 percent of the time. You might as well flip a coin.  7- vs. 10-seeds: This just barely fits our parameters. The seven-seeds have won about 60 percent of these.  Second round games:   4- vs. 5-seeds: Fours have won 55 percent of the time.  3- vs. 6-seeds: Threes, 54 percent.  In the Elite Eight and beyond:   1- vs. 2- or 3-seeds: Favored number one, 55 percent and 59 percent of the time, respectively. (The fact that this late-round matchup has happened enough to be statistically significant should tell you something about how likely it is to happen.)  The biggest surprise here: The most intriguing and frequent upset may be 10-seeds beating 2-seeds. That&amp;#039;s happened just a bit over 40 percent of the time in more than 50 occurrences. That&amp;#039;s a lot. The Visual Recap, Question 1:  (Before we go on: A tip of that hat mcubed.net&amp;#039;s brilliant and incredibly helpful data compilation, which was used for large swaths of this report.) 2. What are the most frequent first-round upsets? Well, as mentioned, the first-round upset that&amp;#039;s most likely to happen is the simple no. 9 over no. 8, which happens nearly half the time. But that&amp;#039;s not much of an upset. The frequency of upsets tails off from 49 percent of the time to never as seeding worsens from 9 down to 16. In general, it&amp;#039;s a steady decline, going down by 6 to 10 percent per seed. But bizarrely, the one exception is the difference between the 11- and 12-seeds. For all the talk of the lauded 5-versus-12 curse, they&amp;#039;re practically interchangeable: 11-seeds have won 33 percent of first round games, and 12-seeds have won 32 percent. The 12-seeds, because of that famous supposed curse, are always a popular first round option, and they&amp;#039;ve been on a hot streak the past two years with five of eight entries reaching Round Two. So feel free to put an 11-seed or two \u2014 even a 12-seed or two \u2014 into Round Two. Know that after that, it drops off significantly: 13-seeds have only managed to move on 22 percent of the time. Though it&amp;#039;s actually happened every year since 2008 (in fact, it happened twice in &amp;#039;08), so it&amp;#039;s not too crazy of a pick. But the real lesson here is that you should be wary of which 4- or 5-seed you choose to go deep into the tourney, as they could be gone after Day One. Oh, and if you&amp;#039;re considering choosing 14- thru 16-seeds, you&amp;#039;re on your own. Enjoy trying to make your billion-dollar fortune. The Visual Recap, Question 2:  3. Which double-digit seed is most likely to reach the Sweet 16? There always seem to be a few Cinderella stories that survive the first weekend. Last year, Florida Gulf Coast became the first 15-seed to reach the Sweet 16 (so don&amp;#039;t count on that happening again). A handful of double-digit seeds often do reach that third round. And if they do, a triumphant 12-seed may be the lowest-ranked team remaining in their region in Round Two, but they won&amp;#039;t have to face a top-level seed yet: They just have to beat the 4-seed (which they&amp;#039;ve done 12 of the 33 times it&amp;#039;s happened) \u2014 or even the 13-seed (in which 12-seeds are 8-for-11), if they&amp;#039;re lucky. If you really want to go for broke in the second round, 12-seeds are, again, not a bad option, as they&amp;#039;ve reached the Sweet 16 round 20 times, which is more often than 11-seeds (who usually face a no. 3 in Round 2), as well as 8- or 9-seeds (both of whom usually get steamrolled by no. 1s). When they get there, ten-seeds have historically been great second-round upset options: They&amp;#039;ve won 25 games in 56 tries (about 45 percent \u2014 almost a toss-up), while 7-seeds have strangely only moved on to the third round 23 times in 85 chances (a paltry 27 percent). The Visual Recap, Question 3:  4. Should my Final Four be made up of only teams from major conferences? Looking at NCAA Tournament results throughout history, we would say yes, just major conferences in your Final Four. But teams from mid-level and small conferences have been muddying the picture in recent years. First, there was George Mason reaching the Final Four in 2006, and the past few years saw Butler reach two straight championship games (before they joined the Big East) along with a Final Four appearance from Wichita State last year. On that note, Wichita&amp;#039;s ranking this year and how they&amp;#039;ll fare in the tourney has been hard to gauge, as they went undefeated but didn&amp;#039;t play a single top-25 team all season. Consider them for your Final Four and title game, and maybe San Diego State as well. Times seem to have changed.  5. Do conference tournament results usually give an idea of which teams will go far in the NCAA Tournament? Or to put it another way: How many Final Four teams in the last ten years won or at least reached their conference tournament final before the NCAA tournament started? Well, it might be worth scrolling through the list of winners and runner-ups in some of the major tournaments (the Big 10, SEC, ACC, etc.), because that often translates to NCAA success: 27 of the past 40 Final Four teams reached their conference tournament final (68 percent), with 21 of them winning that final. And going off of that, seven of the last ten NCAA champs were also conference tournament champs in the same year. So, seeing as there are really less than ten major conferences, that could help give you an idea of which top-ranked teams are in peak condition and ready to make a deep run. The Visual Recap, Question 5:  6. Is it good to take huge risks, or is it better to stay conservative? And to what extent either way? In general, you can be more liberal in the early rounds with the upsets, since they&amp;#039;re bound to happen, make the tournament fun, and you know that predicting those upsets will give you an early edge and fill you with undeserved pride. Get more conservative as you move toward the center of your bracket though: It should mirror the general trajectory of the tournament, which starts off massive and crazy but gets whittled down to the heavyweights within a few rounds. Finally, the more people in the pool, the crazier you should get with the picks \u2014at least in the early rounds. But picking the champion is the most important. Which brings us to\u2026 7. Should I pick a 1-seed to win it all? If I don&amp;#039;t, how far down the line can I go? Bad news for risk fetishists out there: A 1-seed is undoubtedly your best option when picking a champion. Throw some lower seeds into your Final Four, sure, but when it comes down to it, conservatism pays off more often than not in the championship round. Since 1985, 1-seeds have won the tournament 18 out of 29 times (62 percent), and it has only gotten more staggering in recent years, as 1-seeds have won the title in 11 of the past 15 tourneys (73 percent). And if you have to go against the grain, don&amp;#039;t venture past the 2- and 3-seeds: They&amp;#039;ve at least won four titles apiece since &amp;#039;85, but past that, you&amp;#039;re entering a championship desert. The few big upset championships (like no. 6 Kansas in &amp;#039;88 and no. 8 Villanova in &amp;#039;85) were great moments in NCAA history, but are clear anomalies. So yes, picking a 1-seed is clich\u00E9, but it&amp;#039;s time-tested. And remember: You still have to pick the right one of the four. For that, you might just want to go with the crowd: The most popular championship pick among ESPN users has been correct the past two years (35 percent picked Kentucky in 2012; 22 percent got Louisville last year). Again: Apologies to the risk fetishists. The Visual Recap, Question 7:  And so now you have more bits of passably helpful knowledge floating around in your head, and you&amp;#039;ll be angrier when the guy who filled out a bracket in two minutes just before the deadline inevitably wins your money. But overall, this is for entertainment, gentlemen. Remember that. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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