March Madness Brackets: Pick The Teams That Pay For Play

In college basketball, it pays to pamper your players. Connecticut, Duke and North Carolina have each won the national championship recent years, and it’s no coincidence that the three are also among college basketball’s biggest spenders. With thousands of NCAA tournament brackets being filled out this March, with reasons for team selections ranging from point differentials to favorite mascots, why not bet on the teams that invest the most in their on-court success?

We looked at last year’s NCAA tournament bracket and financial filings that each school makes with the Department of Education, and we found that operating expenses are a surprisingly strong predictor for tournament success. Operating expenses are defined as “lodging, meals, transportation, uniforms, and equipment for coaches, team members, and support staff (including, but not limited to team managers and trainers).” Using operating expenses to predict on-court play makes sense in theory: the teams that eat better, travel better, sleep better and train better should, generally speaking, play better. It’s the same rationale that Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, operated under when he purchased a private jet for his team’s travel.

See This Year’s Operating Expenses Bracket
And it works, too. Including the play-in round, the team with the higher operating expenses won in 70% of the games in last year’s tournament. If you used our system to fill out your bracket, you would have correctly picked 68.3% of the games from the round of 64 up to the Final Four. For comparison’s sake, taking the favored teams in those games would have yielded a 65% rate of correct picks. That’s not a large difference in total correct picks, but operating expenses offer a significant advantage if you want to capture those late-round points: team spending correctly predicted half of the Elite Eight and Final Four, whereas picking by the favorites predicted just three of the final eight teams and none in the Final Four.

At the very least, operating expenses are a great system for the first round. They wrongly predicted only six games in the round of 64, good for an 81% success rate. Of those six incorrect picks, two were 8/9 games (generally the most difficult to predict) and two were surprising upsets by Morehead State and Virginia Commonwealth (VCU).
Higher operating expenses don’t always mean a higher seed, either. Our system picked nine upsets in the first round, and only three of them were 8/9 match-ups. Of the remaining six upsets, operating expenses correctly predicted four: Richmond (12) over Vanderbilt (5), Marquette (11) over Xavier (6), Gonzaga (11) over St. John’s (6) and Florida State (10) over Texas A&M (7). The accuracy of these predictions may illustrate how a well-funded team can out-perform its regular season record once the tournament starts.
Our approach of using operating expenses did not perform as well in the round of 32, but it still correctly picked nine out of the 16 games, including two surprising upsets: Marquette (11) over third-seeded Syracuse and Florida State (10) over second-seeded Notre Dame. More good news if your pool includes bonus points for picking upsets. Through the next two rounds, our system went an even 50% and correctly picked two of the teams in the Final Four: third-seeded Connecticut and fourth-seeded Kentucky. They were hardly Cinderella stories, but neither team was considered to be a favorite, either.

A Guided Tour of the 2012 NCAA Bracket

This is my seventh year picking the NCAA tournament bracket for the Journal. There have been bad years. There have been worse years. There have been atrocious years. This year, everything will change. Rather than my gut (and the accompanying crippling self-doubt), I’m following Occam’s Razor: The simplest answer is probably right. (William of Ockham would have made a heck of a sports pundit.)
Kentucky is the best team in the field, by far. North Carolina is the second-best team. Extremely good defenses matter in late March. Tom Izzo.
If the picks feel conventional – who isn’t taking Kentucky? – that’s only because I am so sick of the stylish way I have recently been finishing at the bottom of the pool. Don’t worry: There are a few calculatedly bold picks to keep things interesting. (And if you want really interesting picks, don’t miss the Journal’s bias-free Blindfold Brackets.) And so away we go, lucky No. 7…
SOUTH *Spoiler alert: Kentucky is the best team in the tournament. Most of the country is going to pick the Wildcats to win it all. More importantly, most of your office pool is going to pick the Wildcats to win it all. There is no shame in picking the Wildcats to win it all.
*And yet! If everyone is picking Kentucky as the champ and UK wins it all, then those seemingly innocuous picks in the wild first weekend through the Sweet 16 can make or break your bracket. If you aren’t picking Kentucky to win it all, that seems bold/crazy enough. If you are, you can afford to take some chances in the rest of this region.
*That’s why I’m picking Duke to lose in the Sweet 16 to UNLV – beyond believing UNLV (or even Xavier) has the moxie typical of tourney teams that usually K.O. Coach K’s kids, it’s largely riskless if I think Duke would lose to Kentucky anyway. (Same goes for picking UNLV to upend Baylor.)
*Meanwhile, it’s such a shame that Wichita State and 2011 Cinderella VCU were matched up in the first round. Both teams had Sweet 16 potential. (And if Wichita weren’t lined up with Kentucky in the Sweet 16, I’d have them going even further.)
Summary: First Weekend: (1) Kentucky d. (9) UConn, (5) Wichita St. d. (4) Indiana, (6) UNLV d. (3) Baylor, (2) Duke d. (10) Xavier. Sweet 16: Kentucky d. Wichita St.; UNLV d. Duke. Regional champ: Kentucky.
WEST *Pick against Michigan State coach Tom Izzo in the NCAA Tournament at your own risk. Whether he is a top seed or limps his way in, Izzo seems to have the magic touch in March. This year’s Spartans are typically ferocious rebounders, and the upperclassmen can rely on their experience of scrapping to the Final Four two years ago.
*Otherwise, this region has “bracket-buster” written all over it. New Mexico could go to the Sweet 16 … or lose in the first round to Long Beach State. Marquette could go to the Elite Eight … or trip up against Iona (this year’s VCU?) coming out of the play-in game.
*The wild card is 2-seed Missouri, a top-five team coming off a Big 12 Tournament championship but potentially drawing a fascinating game in the Round of 32 against Florida, which will be more than happy to match up four-guard lineup for four-guard lineup and run.
Summary: First Weekend: (1) Michigan St. d. (8) Memphis, (5) New Mexico d. (4) Louisville, (3) Marquette d. (6) Murray St., (7) Florida d. (2) Missouri. Sweet 16: Michigan St. d. New Mexico, Florida d. Marquette. Regional champ: Michigan St.
EAST *It is dangerous to lean too heavily on what happened in years past. It is a perennial problem for me, and it usually involves believing in Syracuse before the inevitable Orange-flavored let-down. Rather than go long on the ‘Cuse this time, I’m selling short. Way short.
*Defense will rule this region. Ohio State is one of the top defensive teams in the country. West Virginia under Bob Huggins is tenacious (particularly playing in front of rabid ‘Eers fans in nearby Pittsburgh). Florida State just finished a run where it stifled both Duke and North Carolina. And Wisconsin has historically played one of the stingiest defenses in March. It won’t necessarily be pretty – only effective.
*Let’s take a flier in the East, as long as we’re all so sure Kentucky is winning it all: Fearless FSU rides its momentum from its ACC tournament title to knock off Ohio State. Wisconsin grinds up Syracuse. The two teams meet in a regional final where the combined score is in the 60s – a clinic for those who like defense (and Twitter hashtag #ugh for those who don’t.)
Summary: First Weekend: (1) Syracuse d. (8) Kansas St., (4) Wisconsin d. (5) Vanderbilt, (3) Florida State d. (6) Cincinnati, (2) Ohio St. d. (10) West Virginia. Sweet 16: Wisconsin d. Syracuse, Florida St. d. Ohio St. Regional champ: Florida St.
MIDWEST *If you are looking for the 1-seed that might get bounced out before the first weekend is over, it is North Carolina backpedaling as Creighton buries shot after shot, in a scene reminiscent of Northern Iowa knocking off 1-seed Kansas two years ago. If the game weren’t in UNC’s backyard of Greensboro, this would be an upset special.
*Speaking of upsets, the Midwest will feature the tournament’s biggest: 14-seed Belmont – which had a horrible first-round draw last year, when it was a hoopsnik favorite – over 3-seed Georgetown, which has stumbled to early exits over the past few years. The Bruins will become the only double-digit seed to make it to the Sweet 16.
*The most intriguing first-round game? 2-seed Kansas against feisty 15-seed Detroit, which comes out of the same conference as Butler and has earned the endorsement of Butler coach Brad Stevens, who knows a little something about small Midwestern teams making improbable NCAA runs. Even if they don’t take down KU, they will make it interesting.
Summary: First Weekend: (1) UNC d. (8) Creighton, (5) Temple d. (4) Michigan, (14) Belmont d. (6) San Diego St., (2) Kansas d. (7) Purdue. Sweet 16: UNC d. Temple, KU d. Purdue. Regional champ: UNC
FINAL FOUR Michigan State has the rebounding grit and grizzled experience to counter Kentucky’s eye-popping athleticism and fearless youth, but there is simply no solution for UK’s shot-swatting freshman Anthony Davis, college hoops’ most impressive interior defender since Patrick Ewing.
On the other side, North Carolina has taken Florida State’s best punch – the Seminoles knocked the Tar Heels out in the ACC title game. But with center John Henson back in the lineup, UNC beats the ‘Noles when it matters most.
In the finale – and a repeat of their instant-classic match-up back in early December – Kentucky once again gets the best of UNC, and John Calipari finally gets his national championship.
This isn’t a bold pick. After years of over-thinking myself, I give in to a combination of what the relevant metrics tell me and what I’ve seen with my own eyes over the last four months. Every bracket has its “gulp-hard” spots of nagging self-doubt: UNLV over Duke? (Really?) Florida over Missouri? (Really??) Florida State in the Final Four? (Really???)
If anything, with all of three upsets picked in the first round, my bracket is overly conservative. But where it matters most – Kentucky as king – I can rest easy knowing that, at the very least, if the Cats go down early, the rest of the pool is coming with me down the drain. There is a serenity to that idea that nicely balances out what will hopefully be plenty of madness.