Every year analytics provide helpful insight into predicting what will happen in March Madness. Also, every year, no matter how well the stats are able to predict games, an upset always occurs. A popular metric people use and have confidence in is KenPom. KenPom is a group of advanced stats calculated by Ken Pomeroy. This metric has helped determine who the best teams in the country are for the past 20 years. In 2024, the number two team in KenPom, UConn, won the championship, and the number three team in KenPom, Purdue, made the championship. KenPom predicted that UConn had an 18.2% chance of winning the tournament and gave Purdue a 25% chance to make the national championship.

KenPom metrics prove to be successful. How can I implement my own personal metrics in a similar way? Well, this can be difficult to determine, but there are some simple stats to take into account when looking at what team will win a match up. The nine stats that I choose to include for my analyzation are offensive efficiency (OE), defensive efficiency (DE), three-point field goal percent (3pt%), effective field goal percent (eFG%), free throw percent (FT%), rebounds per game (RPG), strength of schedule (SoS), last ten game results (L10), and assist to turnover ratio (Ast/To). By using these basic stats, I can evaluate teams in the tournament in an easy way.

The easiest way to compare all teams based on the same scale is to combine these into some sort of grade for each team. To do this, for each team in the tournament I ranked them 1-68 in each stat. I then added all the rankings up for each team and divided by 9 to get that team's grade. 1 being the best possible grade and 68 being the worst possible. I did this for the 2024 tournament and found that the two best teams by grade were UConn and Purdue. These two teams would eventually play in the national championship where the team with the better grade, UConn, would prevail. This grading system also predicted that UConn would be the champions in 2023.

Now you may be wondering how I implemented this for my personal bracket. It is fairly easy to accomplish, especially with access to Excel. Below is the template I used where I filled in the teams in my preferred order. I had to manually rank each team 1-68 and find the stats manually. All of these stats and others can be found onhttps://www.teamrankings.com/ncb/ . After finding my preferred stats and ranking the teams 1-68, I added all of the rankings and then divided by the total number of different stats used (i.e. if 9 stats are used divide by 9, if 11 stats are used divide by 11). This got me a number grade for each team in the field of 68 between 1 at best and 68 at worst. This grade helped me in comparing teams based on my preferred stats.

After I finished gathering the data and ranking the teams I finished my bracket. My final four includes three number 1 seeds which are Auburn, Florida, and Duke. My other Final four team is Gonzaga. I have Duke beating Florida in my Championship as Duke is by far the best team in the tournament based on my grading system. For my sleeper teams my grading scale likes Yale, UC San Diego, Lipscomb, Akron, Colorado State, and High Point as they are all seeds lower than 12 but graded in the top 20. One problem with my metrics is that it is in favor of offensive focused teams. Heavily defensive teams like St. John’s, Texas A&M, and Saint Mary’s are graded very low even though they are seeded very high. This is simply because of there being five offensive stats and only two defensive stats.