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Rick Zamperin: This nickname algorithm is a March Madness winner

The NCAA men's basketball tournament will grab the attention of sports fans for the next couple of weeks.
The NCAA men's basketball tournament will grab the attention of sports fans for the next couple of weeks. AP Photo/Morry Gash

Commence the madness.

The NCAA men’s basketball tournament, more commonly known as March Madness, is underway as the best of the best U.S. college hoopsters fight for a national championship.

The action is intense, there is drama in nearly every game, and it makes it a lot more fun to watch when you fill out a March Madness bracket.

Ah, the bracket.

If you notice a little dip in office productivity over the next few days, you can point a finger at your co-workers who are paying more attention to their bracket than their to-do list.

Breaking news from Canada and around the world sent to your email, as it happens.

I say let them be, March Madness only comes around once a year.

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Personally, I didn’t have too much trouble filling out my bracket this year because, let’s face it, in many cases, it’s a coin flip. This year, I based my winning teams on head-to-head nickname battles.

Never has a No. 16 seeded team beaten a No. 1 seed in this tournament, and only eight times has a No. 15 beaten a No. 2 (most recently in 2016). So I gave all the top seeds a check mark in round one.

Apart from that, nicknames battled nicknames throughout the tournament and teams like Hurricanes washed out Ramblers, Bonnies bounced Gators, Cougars ate the Aztecs, and Horned Frogs jumped over Sun Devils. See? It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?

When it came down to my Final Four, using my nickname algorithm, the Virginia Cavaliers got the nod over the Michigan Wolverines and the Michigan State Spartans are more powerful than the Villanova Wildcats.

Cavaliers vs. Spartans in the final. I flipped a coin and it came up Virginia.

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