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This one will definitely work, right?

Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, I look at the number of followers of of the basketball team's official Twitter account, or one tenth of the number of followers of the school's athletic department if the school's basketball team does not have its own d...

Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, I look at the number of fans of the basketball team's official Facebook page, or one tenth of the number of fans of the school's athletic department, whichever is greater. The fraction 1/10 is completely arbitrary, but ...

Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, I look at the strength of the school's football team, on the theory that a school with a strong football team and a strong basketball team has clearly invested a lot in its athletics program. My ranking of football teams ...

Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, we go to the well-known dispute arbiter Google Fight. The criterion is the number of Google hits for the quoted phrase "%s basketball", divided by the school's seed. (I would have used Bing hits, except Bing's numbers are...

Once again, it's time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This year, the criterion is the school's graduation rate for basketball players. Lower graduation rate wins. However, if the teams are seeded 11 or more positions apart, I'll give the win to the favorite (just to get rid of highly...

It's that time again: Raymond comes up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This time, I studied all the games played in the NCAA men's basketball tournament since 1985 and computed how many of the games were won by the favorite and how many were upsets, broken down by the numerical difference between the seeding...

Every year, when it comes time to fill out my NCAA bracket, I choose an arbitrary criterion. You'd think this would take less work, but it actually takes more. My original plan was to rank teams based on how much they pay their head coaches, but it turns out that the salaries (and bonuses and perks) of the head coaches of school basketball program...

Methodology explained earlier. Update: As I noted yesterday, the final will be very close, with George Washington University edging out Villanova by two months, 1988.08.01 to 1988.10.05. Other people have come up with their own systems. The person a few doors down from me chose an algorithm that can be captured in three words: "Shorter name...

Okay, somebody handed me a NCAA Men's Basketball Bracket to fill out. I don't know squat about college sports, so I decided that I would fill in the bracket based on the following simple principle: The school whose President (or Chancellor) has served longer will win the match-up. (Not counting the first-round games of the top five seeds in each br...