For as long as I can remember, I have loved the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I love the bracket. I love the underdogs. I love One Shining Moment. I even love the CBS theme music.

As a kid I filled out hand-drawn brackets and scoured the morning newspaper for results of late-night games. As I got older, I started tracking scores using a increasing complex set of spreadsheets. Over time, as my analysis became more sophisticated, I noticed certain patterns to the Madness

I have found that I can use modern analytics and computational tools to gain a better understanding of the tournament itself and even extract some hints as to how the tournament might play out. Last year, I used this analysis to correctly predict that No. 4 seed UConn win the National Title in addition to other notable upsets.

There is no foolproof way to dominate your office pool, but it is possible to spot upsets that are more likely than others and teams that are likely to go on a run or flame out early. While we wait for the main set of games to start on Thursday, "Dr. Green and White" is here to help you fill out your 2024 bracket.

Before we dig into the current bracket in detail, let's start with an overview of my methods and general trends to expect in 2024.

The foundation of my methodology is an observation that I made several years ago that boils down to this:

When it comes to NCAA Tournament upsets, the behavior is exactly the same as in regular season games. The odds are largely predictable based on Vegas points spreads and by tools that can predict point spreads, such as Kenpom efficiency margin data.

All of my analysis of college basketball odds is based on this same premise. Kenpom efficiency data can be used to assign probabilities to any arbitrary basketball match-up. Knowing this, the full season and any tournament can be mathematically modeled, and its odds can be calculated.

My favorite plot to highlight this fact is shown below.

This figure compares the winning percentage for the higher seeds in the NCAA Tournament to the odds expected based on the average point spread of games with that seed combination. The figure shows that data for all seed combinations which have occurred at least 40 times.

Figure 1 tells us why No. 16 seeds have won two times over the past 38 years (1.3% of the time). It is because on average No. 16 seeds are 22.5-point underdogs, and 22.5-point underdogs win straight up 1.4% of the time whether the game in played in March or in November.

There are a few notable deviations from this correlation. For example, No. 10 seeds have surprisingly good luck against No. 2 seeds and No. 9 and No. 5 seeds do not upset No. 1 seeds in the second round or in the Sweet 16 as often as expected. (This could be a discussion topic if No. 9 Michigan State survives in the first round against No. 8 Mississippi State on Thursday.) In general, the correlation is very strong.

The Vegas point spreads and the point differentials predicted by Kenpom efficiency margins, also correlate very strongly. Figure 2 below shows how strong this correlation is for the first-round games in the 2024 NCAA Tournament.

Figure 2 gives us confidence that Kenpom efficiencies can be used to model the results of the NCAA Tournament.

The lead up to this year's Tournament featured an unprecedented number of upsets in the conference tournaments. Of the 32 total conference tournaments, only 11 were won by the No. 1 seed, nine were won by the No. 2 or No. 3 seed, and the remaining 12 were won by a lower seed.

Will all of this conference madness spill into the national tournament?

I attempted to explore this question by simulating the results of the 2024 tournament 5,000 times and counting the number of upsets that occurred in each round.