Overthinking can be bracket buster

CHEYENNE, Wyo. --- For those who have agonized over an NCAA Tournament bracket only to be beaten in a pool by someone with zero knowledge of college basketball, there's an answer.

Psychologists Sean McCrea at the University of Wyoming and Edward Hirt at Indiana University-Bloomington have studied why this happens. Their conclusion: Deep analysis often does more harm than good.

Avid college basketball fans tend to predict more upsets than actually occur and don't outperform random chance in predicting which underdogs win, the psychologists say.

Compared to those who play it safe -- neophytes, maybe, who rely heavily on how teams are seeded -- they end up hobbling themselves, say McCrea and Hirt, who published their findings recently in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology .

"We feel that our skill should mean something," Hirt said. "But I think most of the skill we have is already comprised in the seeding and we can't do better than that."

McCrea and Hirt are college basketball fans. Both said they were less motivated by the noble advancement of science than by repeated schooling by know-nothings.

"There always seemed to be someone who didn't watch a single game all season that would do really well," McCrea said. "It kind of got us scratching our heads."

The psychologists analyzed more than 3 million entries in ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge competition. The average success rate for each team picked was 75.2 percent in 2004 and 72.9 percent in 2005.

Had everyone simply picked winners based on how teams are seeded, their success rate would have been higher: 87.5 percent in 2004 and 75 percent in 2005.