So you’re willing to be a sport and flush $5 on the office NCAA basketball pool, but you don’t want to wind up after Round 2 in the “out of the running” category with your boss’s 8-year-old son. You’re spending your time reading The Mirror instead of, say, the Sports Illustrated “NCAA Tournament Experts’ Picks,” so maybe you’re not entirely plugged in to this “bracketology” thing.
Help is here: Political analyst and statistician Nate Silver, creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, has applied his usual rigorous approach to the tournament and come up with this advice on picking an NCAA basketball champion. (If you don’t want to read it all, you can just crib his bracket.)
Silver first gained notice for his strikingly accurate predictions of the 2008 presidential primary and general election outcomes. But if you’re wondering how some politics geek can possibly pick sports results: Silver got his start forecasting baseball games.