Tips for filling out your 2025 NCAA tournament March Madness Bracket

It’s that time of year again! You’ve watched the games, you know how each team qualified, you complained about the regions and seeding, and you’re ready to fill out your bracket. 

The irony, of course, is that Debbie in Accounting – who hasn’t watched a single college basketball game all year – is going to win your office’s 2025 NCAA Tournament March Madness bracket pool for the fifth straight year. 

Or is she? 

See, I find that people make a lot of mistakes when they enter bracket pools. How do I know that? I’ve run several pools and seen the mistakes. Over years of doing this, certain patterns and trends emerge. 

To help you make your 2025 NCAA Tournament March Madness Bracket picks, I’m going to first give some general advice on pools and then delve into some specifics on this year’s bracket. 

General advice that can give you a better chance of winning your NCAA Tournament March Madness Bracket pool every season

Here’s the #1 biggest mistake that almost everyone makes: picking too many upsets. Sure, the upsets are fun to root for, and they make you feel good when you nail that #8 seed beating the #1 seed in the Round of 32. Bragging rights, am I right? 

Here’s the problem: you probably aren’t going to nail those unless you pick a lot of them, and then even if you get one of them right, you’ve missed all the other ones. 

That leads me right into mistake #2: not knowing the rules of your bracket pool. Sounds simple, but many people don’t take the time to actually look at the scoring system. Does your pool operate on an even scoring system where all picks are worth the same amount? Or, does your pool reward upset picks by adding or multiplying the seed number to the round value? 

If you don’t know the answer, find out. Many pools operate on the simple 1-2-4-8-16-32 scoring system. That means that you just have to pick winners and upsets don’t reward you beyond just getting that pick correct. If your pool is run this way, you should be very stingy with your upset selections. 

Now, if you’re in a pool that rewards upsets, you can be a little more liberal with picking them. That’s because, since those correct picks are worth more points, getting a few picks wrong in order to get a big one right can be worth it.