Coke Zero’s Bracket-O-Matic Takes the Guesswork (Fun?) Out of the NCAA Tourney

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

I have never won an NCAA Basketball Tournament Pool. Face it, I simply don’t follow college basketball, and the few days I get to work on it once the brackets are decided - simply not good enough. I may just have a chance this year … though probably not.

Coke Zero launched this app last year, but this year things have been much improved. Bracket-O-Matic ‘08 enables you to use sliders to weight various categories and comes up with your bracket for you:

• Dynasty vs. Cinderella
• Offense vs. Defense
• Wild Mascot vs. Tame Mascot - Subjective ranking where a value of 9 was maximum wildness, 1 was the most tame, and 5 was neither wild nor tame.
• Senior vs. Frosh
• Star Power vs. Deep Bench
• Hi Seed vs. Lo Seed
• East Coast vs. West Coast
• New Coach vs. Vet Coach

Except for the mascot category, they all seem pretty self-explanatory. Interested in more details on the logic? Check out this PDF file they sent me.

As Coke Zero says:

Take the guesswork out of your tournament bracket. Crack open a Zero, dial in your preferences, and this handy dandy bracket filler outer thing will do the rest.

This’ll be really handy for those of you who enter multiple pools. Of course, you can override any of the program’s picks. And, if you’re participating in the CBS Bracket Challenge, you can submit your picks with a click of the mouse.

We Say: Just for fun, I built a bracket with all the default (centered) settings, and ended up with a Final Four of St. Joseph, Marquette, Kent State, BYU, with BYU meeting St. Joseph in the finals and BYU winning.

Somehow this doesn’t seem right to me.

Still confused? Watch this video: