The March Madness brackets is fresh off the presses. Which of the so-called experts has a bracket worth using for your office pool?
Here were our final bracket rankings from last year. We scored 32 pundits from ESPN, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, and CBS Sports.
The following table ranks the pundits based on their average "Yield" of their 63 total picks. The Yield measures the average payout, using Vegas futures 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. Hit Rate is simply the percent of predictions that were correct. Given the large number of upsets last year, the rankings by Hit Rate and Yield turned out very different (each column is sortable):
Gregg Doyel of CBS had the highest yielding bracket, despite not picking Louisville to win it all, mostly because he was the only one of the 32 pundits to have Michigan in the final (a strong out-of-consensus pick). When ranked by Hit Rate, John Gasaway of ESPN turned in the best performance, hitting on 41 of his 63 picks.
The worst brackets belonged to Colin Cowherd, Michael Wilbon, Andy Katz, and Doug Gottlieb. Cowherd and Wilbon both got less than half their picks right, while all four of these pundits would have lost you more than 20 percent of your money had you bet on their picks.
Finally, here are the cumulative rankings for the pundits for whom we tracked brackets in both 2012 and 2013.
We'll be back next week to recap bracket rankings for the opening weekend.
For those new to our site, PunditTracker levels the playing field by allowing users to compete with the "experts." Head over to our March Madness section now and use the "Vote Now" button to make your own Final Four picks.
Originally published on PunditTracker.
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