Hello everyone! Well, we are on to day 3 of the NCAA Tourney and by now you are probably like me and looking at some pretty mediocre brackets and lamenting the loss of your office pool victory chances. Is that actually the case? To answer that question, this quick study will look at 80 brackets that I made over the last 2 tournaments.

I won't post the brackets here for the sake of your scrolling, but every bracket was created in either 2017 or 2018 with either a random, statistical, or my personal intuition selection and tracked for performance throughout the tournament. To find out how important the First Round is, I ran a correlation test between R1 success and ESPN final bracket score.

The correlation coefficient turned out to be r = 0.57 which shows moderate correlation between the two sets of data. When I put it in a scatter plot, the results match well.

So what does this mean? Well, the most important conclusion to take away from this data is that you are not dead yet! Even though there is correlation, it is weak enough that later rounds can shoot you up a leaderboard later on.

As long as you can hit a minimum threshold of 20/32, you still have a chance for 1000 points in your pool! Brackets with 1000 all have at least 20 correct in the first 2 days. On the other hand, brackets with really good Round 1s often fall flat on their face in Round 2.

Brackets with 16-19 are kind of a crap shoot and your next 2 days will make or break your bracket's success. As long as your Sweet 16 is mostly in tact, you are still fine.

If you are sitting at <50%, I am sorry, you have lost too many teams to be relevant. Better luck next year.

So if you are sitting in the 20th percentile on ESPN right now, don't despair! A new round starts today and it could just be the day your luck turns around!