BlogLab

Picking the teams to reach the Final Four in your men’s basketball tournament bracket requires a combination of art and science. You need to pick deserving teams but also balance the potential uniqueness of your entry. If you have a quartet of squads that is very similar — or even the same — as most of your competitors, it becomes difficult to win a pool and shifts the burden to being the most accurate in the early rounds.

Take too many risks with your Final Four, though, and you might have a busted bracket well before the first semifinal tips off. That would be a disaster, because the closer you get to a perfect Final Four, the better your chances of winning a pool — and because it’s not fun to be eliminated when the games are just getting started.

Here are a few guidelines to help you pick a Final Four that balances realism with opportunity — and should give you a chance to remain competitive all the way until last weekend of the season.

Don’t use all four No. 1 seeds

It is tempting to use the four best teams in the last four spots of your bracket. Resist the temptation. A Final Four like that almost never happens. In fact, only three times over the past 38 years has the Final Four been represented by all No. 1 or No. 2 seeds: 1993, 2007 and 2008. That last year was the only time the Final Four has included all four No. 1 seeds. Only once since then have even three No. 1 seeds made the Final Four.

Advertisement

Using analyst Bart Torvik’s projections to reach the Final Four this year, it is 12 times more likely that there will be zero No. 1 seeds in the Final Four than that there will be four. The most likely scenario is one or two No. 1 seeds. The trick then becomes deciding which one or two No. 1 seeds to trust. Watch out for my survey of the most vulnerable top seeds later in the week, but for now, suffice it to say that No. 1 Purdue (Midwest) lands on that list.

Focus on the top five seed lines

The above hint doesn’t mean we want to shun the top seeds altogether. True dark horses and Cinderellas rarely make it to the last weekend of the men’s tournament, although last year was an exception with No. 9 seed Florida Atlantic. (In 2022, No. 8 North Carolina made the Final Four and, in 2021, No. 11 seed UCLA did the same, but it’s hard to think of North Carolina and UCLA as Cinderellas.) Since the tournament expanded to 68 teams in 2011, teams seeded on the top five lines have taken more than 70 percent of all Final Four slots. The only double-digit seeds to appear in the Final Four in that span were No. 11 VCU (2011), No. 10 Syracuse (2016), No. 11 Loyola Chicago (2018) and No. 11 UCLA (2021). None of those teams advanced any further.

Advertisement

If you can’t decide which teams to push through to that final quartet, you could consult a projection system like Torvik offers. Torvik uses proprietary stats to simulate the tournament 10,000 times and gives probabilities each team will advance to a certain stage of the tournament. You could then compare that to the chances an average seed makes it to a certain round, using data from 2011 to 2023. Using this method, No. 1 Houston (South), No. 2 Arizona (West) and No. 4 Auburn (East) each have higher chances to make the Final Four than an average team at the same seed line should.

Take a chance on an undervalued team with solid fundamentals

You probably need a fairly accurate bracket to win most pools with more than 25 people, so don’t be afraid to take a chance on a Cinderella squad making the Final Four. Just make sure the team is solid in the four factors of basketball — shooting, turnovers, rebounding and getting to the free throw line — on either offense, defense or both. Shooting efficiency determines success in scoring, turnovers affect possession control, rebounding secures second chances, and getting to the free throw line helps contribute crucial points.

Advertisement

For teams seeded sixth or worse, I would focus on their turnover and offensive rebound rates, both of which contribute to extra possessions — a hallmark of many successful underdogs in the men’s tournament.

You could also examine a team’s offensive and defensive efficiencies and compare those to similar tournament teams in the past. For example, No. 1 Connecticut (East) is similar to six teams that reached the Final Four and beyond, a collection of teams that also includes three national champions (Duke in 2010, Villanova in 2016 and Virginia in 2019). No. 11 North Carolina State doesn’t have as many successful tournament teams in its similarity profile, but the Wolfpack does have 2011 VCU — which made a run to the Final Four — as a comparable squad.

My Perfect Bracket includes No. 4 Auburn (East), No. 2 Arizona (West), No. 4 Duke (South) and No. 7 Texas (Midwest) in the Final Four. Other undervalued teams with solid fundamentals include No. 6 BYU (East), No. 5 St. Mary’s (West) No. 7 Florida (South).

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMCxu9GtqmhqYGeBcHySaGhyZ5aeu6K4jJ%2Bmrqpdoq6zr8dmpJqcnprAtHnToqesZw%3D%3D