In your pool, the choice of champion is the most important choice that you’ll make. In the most common scoring system, the correct pick of champion earns 32 points, while that 12 over 5 upset nets you 1 point.

I have all my tournament win probabilities over on the interactive visual. However, it’s difficult to sort the tourney win probabilities from the other numbers.

Based on my college basketball team rankings (margin of victory adjusted for strength of schedule), here are the tourney win probabilities from the visual.

1. Gonzaga, 31.5%.
2. Villanova, 14.4%.
3. North Carolina, 10.5%.
4. West Virginia, 6.6%.
5. Kansas, 6.5%.
6. Kentucky, 4.9%.
7. Louisville, 3.2%.
8. Duke, 2.8%.
9. Baylor, 1.8%.
10. Oregon, 1.8%.
11. Florida State, 1.7%.
12. Purdue, 1.6%.
13. Butler, 1.6%.
14. UCLA, 1.6%.
15. Iowa State, 1.5%.
16. Florida, 1.4%.
17. Virginia, 1.3%.
18. Wichita State, 1.1%.
19. Arizona, 0.9%.
20. SMU, 0.8%.
21. Cincinnati, 0.4%.
22. Wisconsin, 0.4%.
23. Michigan, 0.3%.
24. Notre Dame, 0.3%.
25. Creighton, 0.3%.

If you think Gonzaga has too high a chance at 31.5%, you would be correct. I’ll be discussing how to fix this prediction later this week.

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Good luck!

Are you ready for some March Madness? With the tournament only weeks away, it’s time to start handicapping the field.

Based on ESPN’s bracket projection, I calculated the win probability for each team through each round of the tournament. These calculations depend on my college basketball team rankings.

You can play with the results in this interactive visual.

Despite their loss to BYU, Gonzaga still had the largest win probability at almost 33%. No other team cracked 10%.

There are many things to like about Gonzaga. They’re ranked 5th and 1st in my offense and defense numbers respectively, which come from points per possession adjusted for strength of schedule.

However, they couldn’t crack the top 10 in either preseason poll, a surprisingly powerful predictor of tournament success. This isn’t one of Mark Few’s most talented teams, as it’s unlikely any player gets drafted in the first round of the NBA draft.

I like this Zags teams, but not at 33% to win this tournament.

How to Win Your NCAA Tournament Pool

You want to win your March Madness pool, right?

You’ve come across this site, The Power Rank. A very good start.

However, you can’t just fill out your bracket with the most probable team in every game. For some pools, you need to think contrarian.

To learn more, click here.