Every March, millions of college basketball enthusiasts put their knowledge to the test filling out a NCAA bracket. Although it is one of the most difficult things to do, considering no one has ever created the perfect bracket, there are multiple ways to give yourself the best chance to succeed. Even though it sometimes is successful, picking the teams with the best record or best seed number are not considered effective by college basketball analysts, but I am here to share a few tricks with you that may be successful when filling out a tournament bracket.

The number one strategy in choosing teams is statistics. Not the basic stats, but the ones that the analysts focus on when discussing teams throughout the season. Such statistics like the Rating Percentage Index (RPI). The RPI follows categories like the strength of schedule, records on neutral sites as well as how a team matches up against other teams with good RPIs.

Going along with that is the Basketball Power Index (BPI). BPI takes final scores to games, pace of play, site and strength of opponent into play, which are also important to think about when filling out a bracket.

The second strategy is intuition. Although people may think you’re crazy, your gut feeling about a team may be your best guess, but keep in mind that it can do you just as much harm. The last thing you want to do is second guess yourself because your first guess may give you the best chance to be successful.

The third and final thing to take into consideration is conference. A team that plays in a more elite conference has the advantage going into the tournament because they’ve played better competition. Although there have been upsets by teams from lesser conferences, most of the time it’s the team from a power conference that brings home the win.

Keeping these three big strategies in mind, as well as remembering that a 16 seed has never upset a 1 seed, distance from home for each teams means nothing, in addition to record of a team meaning nothing may help you win your pool or just have bragging rights.

Every person filling out their bracket wants to be that 1 in 9.2 Quintillion, that first person to ever do it, and following these guidelines and reading up on other tips just might do the trick to create the perfect bracket.