I tried a variation of this in the past and it didn’t go so well, but I stand behind my reasoning.

The way Kyle feels about brackets in general is the way I feel about “expert” brackets. Yes, thanks guys, Kansas is the best team. We didn’t need your expert opinion to figure that out. However, Kansas is not going to win the whole thing*. (By the way, I have no idea why George Dohrmann is a basketball expert, but I now have serious respect for him. He’s the only one to deviate from Kansas and Kentucky for a national title pick.)

If you have to pick somebody, of course it’s going to be the Jayhawks because Kansas is the most likely team to win the whole thing. But any reasonable estimate out there has their chances at 25-35%, which is far from the certainty implied by the experts. And that means there’s a 65-75% chance somebody else will win it all. So it truly would be a surprise if the Jayhawks won the title.

The experts aren’t asked to put a degree of certainty on their pick, but if everybody was sure Kansas was going to cut down the nets, Vegas wouldn’t be offering 3-to-1 on them right now. Furthermore, the popular Kansas/Kentucky final is highly unlikely. Chances might be as high as 15%, or slightly higher than the true chances of Duke winning the title.

*When I say they will not win it all, I obviously mean “probably not”. It is not a good idea to traffic in absolutes this time of year. If you insist on it, do so on a situation that is less likely to occur, like Duke winning the national title, or Purdue going to the Final Four. You are more likely to look like a genius that way.