Most valuable games thus far:
NC State over Georgetown - 18pts (11/3, 2nd round)
Florida over Marquette - 16pts (7/3, 3rd round)
Lehigh over Duke - 14pts (15/2, 1st round)
Norfolk St. over Missouri - 14pts (15/2, 1st round)
Louisville over Michigan St - 13 pts (4/1, 3rd round)
Ohio St over Syracuse - 12pts (2/1, 4th round)
Kansas over UNC - 12pts (2/1, 4th round)
Ohio over Michigan - 10pts (13/4, 1st round)
Point values from possible outcomes:
Final Four:
Louisville over Kentucky - 31pts (4/1, 5th round)
All other results - 16pts
Championship game:
Louisville win - 44pts (4/2, 6th round)
Ohio St or Kansas over Kentucky - 38pts (2/1, 6th round)
All other results - 32pts
We can see that despite adding the bonus points for upsets, the most valuable games are still those in the later rounds. We have, however, greatly increased the reward for correctly picking upsets correctly. The two 15/2 upsets in the first round this year were each about as valuable as correctly picking a 1 seed to win a final four game. The championship game will still be the most valuable single game this year, as is probably should be. My bracket only managed to get a single final four team this year (which is about average for me, sadly); it's easy to tell that some teams are pretty good, but not always easy to figure out which ones will win 4, 5 or 6 games in a row. A perfect bracket up until now would be worth 247 points.
The other big question though is how this scoring system impacts bracket pools. As my office pool used my new scoring system this year, they're my test sample. 15 brackets were filled out (I'm winning the non-paying division!). For anonymity purposes, we'll call these people #1 through #15. I'm also adding someone named "Chalk" which would be the result from picking every higher seeded team to win.
Person Score Traditional Score Traditional Rank
1 112 79 3
2 108 77 5
3 108 82 1
4 98 77 5
5 93 79 4
6 88 80 2
7 77 66 8
8 73 53 11
9 70 63 9
10 70 50 12
Chalk 68 68 7
11 61 37 16
12 60 54 10
13 59 50 12
14 58 50 12
15 53 45 15
If the formatting isn't too terrible, we can see that changing the scoring system doesn't drastically change who did well and who didn't. The max movement by any individual was 4 spots. As 'Chalk' didn't pick up any bonus points, obviously he moved down, and it's nice to see that instead of being slightly above average (7th) we bumped this hypothetical individual down 4 spots. As it turns out, the scoring system won't change who wins our competition, though it could have.
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