Duke Is the Right Favorite — But These Underrated Teams Could Win Your Pool
The public isn’t overcommitting to the Blue Devils like past tournament favorites, but teams like Texas Tech, Iowa State and Gonzaga are still being overlooked.
Note: This story was a collaboration with Jason Lisk of PoolGenius. Subscribe to their free newsletter for data-driven college basketball insights. And for a mathematical edge in your March Madness pools — PoolGenius subscribers win 3x more often than expected — check out their NCAA Bracket Picks for 2025.
A lot of the casual fun of an NCAA tournament pool is picking who you think will win each game — or sometimes, who you want to win. (Or whose mascot would win in a hypothetical fight.) But serious bracket-pickers know that it’s just as important to consider who your competition might be backing as well — and how many competitors you have to beat out along the way.
That’s why it’s important to look for value in each pick, especially in terms of how you might make high-probability picks while still differentiating yourself from what everyone else is picking. Using a combination of PoolGenius’ NCAA tournament odds and public-picking trends data, Jason has identified a few takeaways that might help you might gain an edge by taking smart risks that go against the grain.
(Note: All public pick data is as of Monday afternoon, March 17.)
Duke isn’t a favorite you can fade this year.
It’s no surprise that Duke is favored by the models to win the championship, as they are clearly the highest-rated team in the field according to the power ratings. (Assuming Cooper Flagg is OK from the ankle scare he suffered last week.) But what is surprising, is that the public doesn’t seem to be overrating the Blue Devils.
Here are the highest-probability pre-tournament favorites in the PoolGenius predictions going back to the 2010-11 season, along with what share of the public was backing them to win the title:
All of the surrounding favorites with odds of at least 20 percent to win the title were supported by the public in a higher proportion — often significantly so. (Check out Kentucky being taken by nearly 40 percent of pickers in 2012, for example, despite their title odds only being slightly above 20 percent… though that did end up working out for UK in the end.)
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But for Duke, their popularity with the public this year is almost perfectly in line with their odds to win in the PoolGenius model. This is likely due to several factors, including an exceptionally strong crop of fellow No. 1 seeds for the Blue Devils to split odds with, as well as the uncertainty of Flagg’s health status scaring off potential public backers.
The public is (mostly) getting it right.
As part of this trend, we also see that most of the top contenders’ public support is unusually in tune with the PoolGenius projected championship odds. Here are all the tourney teams who either have a 2 percent chance of winning the title, or are being picked by at least 2 percent of the public to win it all:
Six of the seven most likely champs have a public pick rate within 1 percent of their title odds. The one exception is Florida, which the public is overvaluing a bit. But even the Gators’ gap between perception and probability is nowhere near the biggest misalignments on our list of favorites from above.
Do your bargain shopping elsewhere.
So what does this mean for your picking strategies? With no standout value picks at the top of the championship list, this year’s best tactic may focus less on undervalued champ picks and more on differentiating yourself elsewhere in the bracket. Take, for instance, these teams with the biggest differentials between Final Four odds and the share of public brackets taking them to go that far:
None of these value picks to the Final Four have great odds — all are below 15 percent. And if you add up all their odds, they are still below 100 percent in total, meaning if you took all of them, you would be an underdog to get a Final Four pick right. Still, they represent cases where the public at large may not be recognizing their potential to beat expectations for their seeds.
These teams also present some high-variance opportunities, like Texas Tech and Iowa State’s injury uncertainty or Gonzaga and/or Louisville needing to pull a big upset early to set up a deep run. If things break right and you hit right on one or multiple of them, it could pay outsized dividends in pools where the big favorites are mostly priced correctly.
And if you want to dig even deeper for value, consider the underrated Elite Eight potential of Gonzaga (+10 percentage point gap between PoolGenius odds and public share), Arizona (+9), Illinois (+9), Louisville (+9) and the UNC/SDSU winner (+9). Or the Sweet Sixteen chances of Colorado State, who has a 36 percent chance of making it that far in the PoolGenius odds but is only being picked to do so in 8 percent of public brackets, a massive +28 percentage point gap.
Overall, this year’s bracket strategy isn’t about chasing championship picks as much it’s about targeting overlooked teams with real upside at the Final Four, Elite Eight and Sweet 16. And whatever you do, remember that the key isn’t just to be different — it’s to be different where it actually matters, in rounds where you can potentially pick up a disproportionate edge in your pool’s scoring system. Good luck!
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Filed under: College Basketball