Grading The Pundits' Brackets: Jay Bilas And Barack Obama Will Make You Money, Seth Davis And LeBron James Will Lose It

With the first two rounds of March Madness complete, let's see how the pundits fared with their brackets. We scored pundits from ESPN, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, and CBS Sports, throwing in President Obama, LeBron James, and Nick Lachey for good fun (all three made their brackets available on ESPN).

As a reminder, our " $1 Bet Yield" metric calibrates predictions for boldness by measuring the average payout (using Vegas odds) had you placed $1 bets on each of the pundit's selections. This approach fits well with March Madness, since it mimics bracket scoring systems that award extra points for predicting upsets. We used standard Vegas odds for round one and Sweet 16 futures odds for round two (courtesy of sports book an online sportsbook).

$1 Bet Yield

Jeff Goodman of CBS took first place, thanks to his picks of both Xavier and Florida to make the Sweet 16. It was a tough first weekend for the pundits overall, however, with only seven of the 26 returning a $1+ yield. Vegas, the best proxy for crowd consensus, significantly underperformed "Chalk" because it incorrectly predicted lower seeds such as UConn and Alabama to win their first round matchups and Wichita State to make the Sweet 16. Meanwhile, Obama and Lachey did quite well; King James did not.

ESPN's Jay Bilas had the most accurate bracket based on the standard hit rate approach (# of correct calls divided by # of total calls).

Hit Rate

For a breakdown of these two metrics by round, click here.

We will update these rankings following the championship game, using Final Four and championship futures odds.

Republished with permission from PunditTracker.com. PunditTracker's mission is to bring accountability to the prediction industry by cataloging and scoring the predictions of pundits. The site, which is currently running as a blog, is slated to officially launch in the spring.