Men's Fitness (March 3) -- "To get a perfect bracket is impossible,” says Sheldon Jacobson, computer science professor at the University of Illinois and self-proclaimed bracketologist. “There are more than nine quintillion bracket combinations—that’s a 9 with 18 zeros.” Jacobson suggests you fill out your bracket before the teams are even announced, based solely on seeds, insisting that our biases and emotional attachments to teams cloud our judgment. “It sounds like heresy, but it works,” he insists. Also: Global Post (March 14), Reuters (March 14).
Related story: Chicago Inno (March 15) -- "(This year) I'm choosing a bracket through BracketOdds, a program from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's computer science department led by professor Sheldon Jacobson. It's based off the idea is that seeding is the most likely predictor of who moves on in the tournament: number one seeds have won the national championship over 60 percent of the tournaments since 1985, the BracketOdds team explains. So many of the brackets generated by the tool have number one seeds winning.