Tips for filling out your bracket

A 16 seed still has never beaten a 1 seed in the Men's NCAA Tournament. The 15 seed won once last season when Middle Tennessee shocked Michigan State, but it only happened seven times before that. The odds are against the 1's and 2's falling this year. 

Should you enter the same bracket picks for office pools of 10 and 1,000 entries? Of course not! While chalk could easily win your 10-entry pool, it will almost certainly require some risk taking to beat out 999 other entrants. Mind your pool size before you submit your picks.

Not all office pools are the same. Some give huge bonuses for picking upsets. Others give bigger bonuses for picking the Final Four correctly. Look at your scoring rules, and adjust your pool strategy accordingly.

The tournament committee has finally consulted advanced analytics this year to create the bracket, but it's unlikely the seeds match the real team strength. Sites like TeamRankings.com, KenPom.com and Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight offer free, objective rankings that figure in objective data like margin of victory and pace to create better rankings. Teams like West Virginia, North Carolina and Virginia look like sleepers going by the objective data.

Knowing who your opponents will pick provides a big advantage. You can find data for everyone who fills out a bracket online. If you're in a larger pool, it makes sense to pick more sleepers that are less popular, especially for your tournament winner.

Upsets can be fun, especially when you pick them correctly in your bracket. There will be upsets this year, especially in the first round: 9 seeds beat 8 seeds about 50 percent of the time; 10 seeds beat 7 seeds 39 percent of the time; 11 seeds defeat 6 seeds at a 35 percent clip; 12 seeds beat 5 seeds 32 percent of the time. You can even find some value in the first round with 13 seeds (20 percent) and 14 seeds (15 percent).

Just because upsets happen doesn't mean it's a bad idea to pick the higher seeds. Just going by the history of seeds, it's always a safer play to pick the better-ranked team. If in a smaller pool, taking less risk could be good enough.

Just because a team finishes hot, winning its conference tournament, doesn't mean it'll continue playing well into the tournament and vice versa. Despite the runs that UConn has shown in recent years, winners of top tournaments are often ousted in the first round, while teams that don't win their conference tournaments can still win it all, as Villanova showed last season.

If you're looking for help picking games, the Vegas spreads and odds to win the tournament can be a terrific guide. Worse seeds are often favored to beat better seeds, which is a good place to start for picking early upsets.

Gonzaga is on a quest to win it all out of the WCC, but the odds are very much against the Zags. The Bulldogs already lost out on their quest to go undefeated by losing to BYU, and the last team to win from a non-major conference was UNLV from the Big West in 1990. Recently, MVC power Wichita State entered the tournament undefeated in 2014 before losing to Kentucky in the Round of 32.

Didn't pick the big sleeper that busted your bracket? Chances are not many other entries did either. Most tournament scoring systems grade the final rounds as the most important, so the key is to minimize the damage and get as many of your Final Four picks correct as possible.

One entry can be fun. What's even more fun? Winning your office pool. Entering more brackets increases your chances of winning. If you're not sure about who to pick as your winner, you could use identical bracket entries and change up the winner as you go for the money.

The fact is that local office brackets are usually more likely to have entries picking the home teams. If you're in a bracket in Kentucky, expect a lot of Wildcats fans, and a bracket in Kansas would expect plenty of Jayhawks fans, with popular picks that are even higher than elsewhere. If these pools are especially large, picking against these home teams can be a good plan.

It can be annoying if your team isn't a college basketball power, but the fact is that the powerhouse schools usually win the NCAA Tournament. The last school to win the Men's NCAA Tournament for the first time was Florida in 2006, and then the Gators won it again the following year. Over the last 20 years, we've seen only three other first-time winners. Of course, every year is unique, so all hope isn't lost for schools like Gonzaga and Baylor.

Over the last 14 seasons, all winners with the exception of UConn in 2014 were a 1, 2 or 3 seed. Picking a worse seed probably won't net you much profit.

Round of 32 matchups often net 2 seeds against 10 seeds, and that's not always an easy win for the better-seeded team. In fact, 2 seeds have only won 60 percent of those matchups.

We're bound to see some 3 seed vs. 6 seed games in the Round of 32 again this year. These matchups have been almost 50/50 in the past, with the 3 seed winning only 55 percent of the time. These matchups could be good upset picks.

It's often said that teams that create turnovers are tough to prepare for in the tournament, and the track records of head coaches like Rick Pitino (Louisville), Bob Huggins (West Virginia), Mike Anderson (Arkansas) and Shaka Smart (Texas) back up that claim. Pitino is 53-18, Huggins is 29-22, Anderson is 8-7 and Smart (albeit unlikely to make the tournament) is 7-6 all time in the tournament. Richard Pitino's Minnesota Golden Gophers could be another tough out.