Breadth Thrusts & Bread Crusts: An Active Approach To March Madness

JC Parets
March 31, 2022

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

This year’s March Madness has been maddening indeed. Brackets were busted early and often. Three of the #1 seeds lost before they even had a chance to play for a trip to the Final Four. As challenging (and exciting) as that was, I’ve got a deeper frustration with it: It’s a passive participant’s paradise. 

Let me explain. 

Before the field of 64 is even set, we get deep dives on the various teams and their prospects. Stats are analyzed, stories are told. When the brackets are set, the picking begins. Though no games have yet been played, participants reason through potential matchups, from the first round all the way through to the finals. Bragging rights (and often more than that) are at stake for having properly allocated all your resources before the first whistle is blown. It’s about setting and forgetting. No feedback loops, no opportunities to adjust exposure based on changing tournament conditions.

Sounds a lot like passive investing to me. From a suite of investment options, you set your exposure and never deviate, regardless of how market conditions may change. The focus is always on “could” or “should” because “is” doesn’t get to be part of the conversation. 

A portfolio that doesn’t have a mechanism for following strength is similar to a not being able to lean into a #15 that upsets a #2 in the first round. I didn’t pick St. Peter’s to beat Kentucky, and, honestly, if given a chance to allocate exposure to them after that, I don’t know that I would have. 

But changing our approach to navigating the NCAA Tournament bracket so that I could have is kind of intriguing.

Here’s an idea for more active tournament participation. Each player in the pool begins the first round with 32 points. These are to be allocated (equally, unequally or not at all) among the games in that round. If you don’t have a good feel for a game, move your exposure elsewhere (or keep it on the sidelines and save it for later). If your pick is right, you gain what was allocated, if you are wrong, you lose what is allocated. Take what you have after the first round and spread it among the actual games in the second round. No more “could” and “should” matchups - we can have a bracket based on matchups that actually “are”. Repeat the process all the way through to the final game. 

I’m sure there are tweaks and adjustments that would need to be made along the way, but this seems more interesting to me than guessing where we will end up before we have even begun and along the way having to think about a potential Sweet Sixteen matchup that, in all likelihood, will never take place. 

Now I just need someone with a good memory to remind me of this before next year’s tournament gets underway.

 

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