The Great March Madness Experiment 2009

Winning a March Madness pool is not a science. We know this because sports ignorance, senility, dementia and cranial airiness are not hindrances to winning. They may in fact be advantages. Extensive viewing, analyzing and talking-head listening does not give you an advantage over Doris from accounting or Randy the guy who sleeps under the table and eats his own nail clippings.
So we at The Differ (click on that to see what magical world lies behind) decided to perform an experiment. We have selected 12 methods for filling out a bracket to see which one will fare the best. While we understand that none of these hold any scientific merit, we just wanted to see what might work.
We set up an ESPN group and filled out a bracket for each of the twelve methods we selected. You can follow this link to watch our group's progress after the tourney starts tomorrow. Here are the methods:

• Alternating Seeds (The I'm Bored Method)- In the first round all of the higher seeds win, second round all the lower seeds win, third round higher seeds, and so forth. Since the Final Four features the same seeds, from there we alternated based on their RPI ranking.
• Higher Seeds (The I'm Lazy Method)- Higher seeds win straight through. In the Final Four we used RPI rankings again.
• Offense (The I Like Allen Iverson Method)- The team with the higher average points scored moves on.
• Defense (The There's No "I" in Team Method)- The team with the lower average points allowed moves on. (Does defense win championships?)
• Women's RPI (The Realization That There's Women's Basketball Method)- This is based on the RPI of the team's women's counterparts. The higher RPI moves on.
• Mascots (The I Like T-Shirt Cannons Method)- Whoever I think has the better mascot wins. While mostly arbitrary, I did set up a few ground rules on this one. If your team's nickname is shared by another team in the tourney, you are eliminated. However, if both teams in a matchup are eliminated, then I pick the better one.
• Coin Flip (The I've Got to Find a Use for This Penny Method)- This one is self-explanatory. (I'm being told to not be so presumptuous, so here.)
• Alphabetical (The English Teacher Method)- The team whose is alphabetically first moves on.
• Reverse Alphabetical (The Really Bad English Teacher Method)- The reverse of that.
• Founding Year (The History-Buff Method)- Which ever school in a matchup was founded first moves on.
• Reverse Founding Year (The I Only Go Back So Far With My Dates Method)- The newer school gets to pass.
• RPI (The I Can't Trust My Own Instincts Method)- The higher RPI ranked team moves on.
  

So those be the methods. We will not reveal the brackets yet, we want there to be some suspense. But we'll see who gets what. I would ask for you good luck wishes, but we don't need it now. We all win like this.