2024 Bracket Picks Writeup

Table of Contents

1. Introduction & Welcome

2. A Note / Treatise On Expectations

3. Early Predictions & Value Analysis (Mon)

4. Initial Brackets Explanations (Mon)

5. Comparing Tournament Projections (Tue)

6. Final Predictions & Value Analysis (Wed)

7. Changes In Wednesday Brackets (Wed)

8. Teams The Brackets Favor vs. Fade (Wed)

9. Brackets With Non-Traditional Scoring (Wed)

1. Introduction & Welcome

To our returning subscribers, it’s great to have you back with us again in 2024, and we appreciate your loyalty.

Even when you have an edge in pools, outcomes from year to year are going to be extremely boom-or-bust (and more often bust). You can go years with negative returns before a big win comes and makes it all worth it.

This site would not exist without the ongoing and growing support of a subscriber base that understands that dynamic, trusts the process, and takes a longer-term view. Thanks y’all!

If you’re new this year, welcome to the neighborhood. We’re honored that you spent some of your hard-earned cash to geek out with us on NCAA brackets this year.

About This Writeup

The purpose of this writeup is two-fold:

1) Share data-driven insights on the 2024 NCAA tournament

By Monday morning, we will be over the 100-hour mark in terms of time spent researching teams, evaluating the 2024 seeding decisions, analyzing paths to the championship in each tournament region, and looking at public picking trends data.

In this writeup, we’ll share all the key highlights as they relate to bracket picking.

(To see the results of all our team research, don’t miss our Teams page, which will be live late Sunday night.)

2) Explain the rationale behind picks you might see in customized brackets for your pools.

After our initial release of customized brackets on Monday evening, March 18th, you will be able to generate customized bracket picks for pools you set up on the My Brackets page.

Reading this writeup should address at least some of the questions you may have about why we’re recommending certain picks this year.

(This product optimizes brackets for many different scoring systems, so given time constraints, we focus the majority of this writeup on the most popular 1-2-4-8-16-32 scoring system.)

What’s New In 2024

We also wanted to highlight a couple product updates.

Survivor and Calcutta Products

This year we’ve broken out our NCAA Survivor Picks and Calcutta Auction Tools as independent products.

They are available either with our new Bracket Picks PLUS package, our annual Pool Picks and Pool Picks PLUS subscriptions, or any All-Access Subscription (which includes betting picks).

Monday Night Live Chat

Mark your calendar, because we are going to test out doing our first ever bracket strategy live chat. At 9pm ET on Monday our very own Jason Lisk will answer all of your wildest 2024 bracket picking questions.

We’ve added a new “Chat” link in the top navigation bar above; that’s where it will take place.

If you would like to ask a question at any time, though, you can always do that in the Forum.

Return to Table of Contents

2. A Note / Treatise On Expectations

To kick things off, before we get into any 2024 bracket analysis, we wanted to share our annual missive on expectations for using our bracket picks, which is especially important for first-time subscribers to read.