Should you pick Kentucky to win?

ByALOK PATTANI
March 18, 2015, 12:50 PM

— -- When you fill out your NCAA men's bracket, should you pick Kentucky to win the title? Probably not, if you want to beat the others in your prediction pool. Let me explain.

At first, Kentucky seems like the obvious pick. The College Basketball Power Index ( BPI) gives the Wildcats a 49 percent chance to take home the title, and the team with the next-best chance is Wisconsin, at just 11 percent.

But if you want to beat the others in your pool, the problem you have to consider is that a whole lot of other people are picking Kentucky. The latest data from the ESPN Tournament Challenge shows that just around half of brackets have Kentucky as the national champion.

So should you pick a dark horse to win it all? Or should you just stick with Kentucky?

The answer is, sometimes you should stick with Kentucky, and sometimes you shouldn't, depending on what your pool looks like -- the scoring system, the pool size and so on.

Let's start with some assumptions to help us simplify the problem:

1. Say your pool uses the basic Tournament Challenge scoring system, where the points for a correct pick double in each succeeding round. Getting the champion right is very important in this format.

2. Assume your ability to make predictions is of roughly average quality. If you're really good at making all your other picks -- not if you think you're good, but if you're actually good -- then you may not have to be as risky with your champion pick.

3. And for the purposes of this article, let's say you're trying to win your pool, and not just finish near the top.

Even after these simplifying assumptions, this a pretty complicated analysis. That's where we turned the BPI projections over to our super-intelligent friends at TeamRankings, who are experts in the field of NCAA Tournament bracket pool analysis.

Using engines that simulated bracket pools of various sizes and actual tournament results tens of thousands of times, they tested the impact of picking a variety of champions in your bracket.

From those tests, they could determine if picking Kentucky or another team would maximize your chances of winning a pool of a given size, and what those chances would be.

You can see the results in the chart:

For small pools of around 10 entries, Kentucky is the optimal champion pick, increasing your chances of winning from the baseline of 10 percent (since you are one of ten in your pool) to just over 13 percent. That's no guarantee, but it's a significant bump.

But for most medium-sized and bigger pools, it's almost always better to avoid Kentucky in favor of a less popular team like Gonzaga, Virginia or Villanova. Those teams are undervalued national champions -- each being picked in only 2 to 4 percent of brackets, but each 7 to 9 percent likely to win it all, according to BPI.

In the analysis of some of the larger pools, Wisconsin and Arizona also show up as more valuable champion picks than Kentucky, though not strong as the previous three.

One thing to keep in mind: These are still long shots, giving you perhaps a 1-in-40 to 1-in-15 chance to win, depending on your pool size. And picking these undervalued contenders also increases your chances of finishing lower in your bracket pool, especially if Kentucky does win it all.

But if you pick Kentucky and half of your competitors do the same thing, you'll have to nail a bunch of other picks to finish on top. Unless you're really good at that, you're better off taking a chance with a high-risk, high-reward champion pick.

So assuming you're in a big pool and want to have the best shot of taking home the title, pick one of the undervalued teams and pray that the Wildcats' pursuit of perfection ends while your team cuts down the nets.

Special thanks to TeamRankings.com for providing results from bracket pool simulations. Check out their customizable NCAA bracket picks here.