Great writeup. Was wondering what your thoughts are for strategy with more and more of these bracket contests where you multiply the seed by the round point level to get a score for a correct pick. For example, BYU that you mention above would be a great pick for the final four in my bracket since they are "expected" to make the final 4 27% of the time. Being a 7 seed they should be "expected" to garner 8.8 points (7*8*27%) where as a team like Syracuse would be expected to garner 2.3points (1*8*47%). So if you could play the bracket a million times you would come out ahead picking BYU, however 75% of the time you are going to end up with no points for that game. So should there be more weight toward still picking syracuse? I haven't seen many places give out thoughts on these types of scoring systems so i thought I would see what your thoughts were. Thanks.

Thanks for the link.

http://insider.espn.go.com/insider/tournament/bracket/predictor

They show you a bunch of considerations like past seed differential performance (i.e., 5 seeds beat 12 seeds 68% of the time), past matchups of similar teams, and the play-by-play simulator (which I'm guessing is Accuscore or something like it).

BYU was really underseeded, btw, I guess because they lost 5 games (including in the MWC tourney) against a somewhat weak schedule. They had a great point differential, though. The Tourney is kind of a crapshoot every year, but there are a lot of good value picks this time if you have the courage to follow through with them.