Irrational About Indiana

Gloriously, it's almost time to fill out the brackets. Will Leitch of Deadspin had a piece in yesterday's New York Times about NCAA tournament pools. It includes this funny/probably useful tip on how to pick the winners, which includes the latest subtitle for this blog, seen above:

Stop watching games. The worst handicapper is one with a human bias. And the most prevalent bias is the fallacy that having watched a team all season confers an advantage. If you’ve been following Indiana all year, you are no longer rational about Indiana — or any of its opponents. And you can’t dispassionately rank Indiana against teams you haven’t seen, either. The trick: ignore basketball altogether. “The best handicappers are people who don’t watch games at all,” Carlin says. “The brain is one of the least effective predictive machines we have.”