The March Madness bracket came out Sunday, with the field of 68 NCAA basketball teams announced and picks underway for office pools.
The field for this year's basketball championships, which was revealed on Sunday by the 2018 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Championship, features a combination of old and new talent, with regular staples playing alongside newcomers and teams that have not featured in the tournament for long, CBS News noted.
There is more to picking the winners for the 2018 NCAA Tournament than just blindly filling out a form, but not everyone has the time or energy to pour over the schedule and analyze the metrics before filling out a bracket.
If you are not a seasoned expert, where do you even begin?
The San Francisco Chronicle noted that, while there is no right or wrong way to fill out your bracket, there are trends that emerge year after year which could make things easier.
For example, it is almost a given that a top-seeded team will go down in the first round and it helps to pay attention to this.
A look at the last 25 years of the tournament shows that a team seeded 2-4 has fallen in the first round to their lower seeded counterpart in 22 of those years, with this happening at least twice in 13 of the past 25 years.
Baffled by the numbers? You could always turn to uniform colors to dictate your pickings, but if you are going to do this, Sporting News suggests going for a shade of blue.
The Arizona, Duke, Gonzaga, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and UCLA have all worn the crown and each of their uniforms are blue, so there may be something to the color game.
Taking location into account could also help boost your chances of making a top pick when filling out your bracket.
History has shown that home advantage influenced a team's chances of winning and this comes down to having more fan support and less traveling to do.
USA Today suggests looking at where each game is being played and determining which school the tournament site is closer to, then making your pick based on this.
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