Every year during March Madness the quest to create the perfect bracket is taken on by sports fans everywhere. As someone who doesn’t follow college sports at all, I’ve never come close to even winning a pool amongst friends, let alone achieving the mythical perfect score. So this year I decided to try something different.

As usual, I made my regular bracket and felt pretty confident in my picks after minutes of research into the teams. But then I realized something, I was probably going to lose again. My picks always suck so much that I would probably be better off just picking teams to win via some random meme of a method. Which is exactly what I did.

I’ve created 9 total brackets. One of my actual picks and eight created by other methods I thought could plausibly outperform my non-existent knowledge of college hoops. The experiment will now be whether my real picks come out on top, or if I discover a better system for success.

Here are all nine of my brackets. You can follow along with updates throughout the tournament on our social media (@GetUpBallSports on Twitter), or check back here after the tournament is over for my wrap piece on how it all played out, and how each bracket performed. I can’t wait to discover how little I know, and how much time I wasted doing research for my bracket when clearly a better method was readily available.

1. My actual Picks

Method: Wasted time doing research and made picks.

Result: (1) Duke over (1) Virginia.

2.Coin Flip

Method: A coin was flipped.

Result: (5) Auburn over (12) Murray State.

3. Weighted Random

Method: Lottery balls were assigned to each school based on their seeding. 1 seeds got 16 entries, 2 seeds got 15 entries, etc. A random number generator was then used to determine which team wins.

Result: (1) North Carolina over (2) Michigan State.

4. Cinderella Random

Method: Lottery balls were assigned to each school based on their seeding. 1 seeds got 16 entries, 2 seeds got 15 entries, etc. A random number generator was then used to determine which team wins. HOWEVER, if an underdog happens to win, they inherit the lottery balls of the team they beat. So if a 15 seed (with two balls) beats a 2 seed (with fifteen balls), in the next round the 15 seed would compete with 15 lottery balls.

Result: (5) Mississippi State over (2) Kentucky.

5. Favourites

Method: The favourite wins every time.

Result: (1) Duke over (1) Virginia.

6. Offensive Juggernauts

Method: The team with the highest scoring offense during the season wins every time.

Result: (1) Gonzaga over (1) North Carolina.

7. Defence Wins Championships

Method: The team that allowed the fewest points against during the season wins every time.

Result: (1) Virginia over (2) Michigan.

8. What’s in a Name?

Method: I decided who would win based off which team nickname would win in a fight.

Result: (11) Arizona State Sun Devils over (6) Iowa State Cyclones.

9. Copycat of Last Year

Method: Last year’s results, again. It worked once right?

Result: (1) Virginia over (3) Texas Tech.

Note: Other than in my actual picks and last year’s results, all “Final Score” predictions were picked by setting a random number generator between 50-100 and then hitting it twice.