Better Break a Bank: When Filling Out a Bracket Based on Tuition, Richmond Rolls

If you so much as open an Internet browser this week, you will probably accidentally discover four or five tricks to filling out your NCAA Tournament bracket. But one of my favorite methods to read about every year is the “pick the team with the higher tuition” scheme. The Awl details that trick for this year’s bracket.The Final Four, if you follow their path of picking the team with a higher tuition every time, pits No. 16 Lehigh and No. 4 Vanderbilt on one side, with No. 9 Wake Forest and No. 7 Richmond on the other. Richmond’s $40K+ tuition carries the day for the Spiders, who “win” the ignominious title in this projection. This format also provides us with a Sweet Sixteen featuring Lehigh, Michigan State, Georgetown, and UC Santa Barbara in the Midwest, which is, alas, the sort of shock that can only happen in Internet fantasy worlds.

But I also found it interesting to flip the script and take the teams with lower tuitions in each matchup. If one does that, one gets a Final Four of Brigham Young, San Diego State, Utah State, and West Virginia, with the Cougars topping the Aggies in the final. And the most jobbed teams in that measuring are the two Florida schools: in any other region, Florida and Florida State would make the Final Four, but BYU-Florida in the first round pits the teams with the two lowest tuitions in the Tournament against each other immediately, while the Seminoles get thumped by the Cougars in the regional final.

Is there anything to learn from this? Probably not, except that tuition in Utah and Florida is rather cheap. (Though, frankly, tuition’s just part of cost of attendance.) As with almost anything related to March Madness, the fun is the point.

(HT: The Awl via SB Nation.)

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