King Reigns Over Harvard Bracketology

The Kentucky Wildcats (38-2) ascended to the throne of college basketball Monday night, but in Cambridge, Mass., a different sort of king was being crowned. With Kentucky's victory over the Kansas Jayhawks (32-7), junior Coulter King secured first place in the first annual Harvard Bracketology contest.

King correctly picked three out of the four Final Four teams (Kentucky, Ohio State, and Kansas), the two championship game participants, and the national champion Wildcats.

“Early on in the process, I knew I had something of a chance, but I didn’t think I would win,” King said. "Then, when I got into the top 20, I started to see how viable my bracket really was.”

He also chose pragmatism over sentimentality in predicting an early exit for Harvard.

“It was tempting to go with Harvard, but I felt confident enough in the bracket,” King said. “Vandy had so much momentum. They won the SEC [tournament], they were shooting well from three, so I felt like it was best to pick strategically. It would have been great if they had messed up my bracket.”

The tournament, organized by the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective, attracted 405 unique brackets from a diverse selection of the Harvard community, including students from all grades and even two entries from Statistics 104 professor Michael Parzen.

Constructed by junior Andrew Cohen, the tournament’s website (harvardbracketology.com) featured an exponential scoring system—one point for correctly-picked second-round games and 32 points for the championship game—that included adding a team’s seed number to each correct selection as a bonus for picking upsets; for instance, 12 extra points for 12-seed VCU’s victory over Wichita State. King credited the scoring system for his choice to pick 10-seed Xavier in the Sweet 16.

And he needed every one of those bonus points. With 314 points, King defeated the runner-up, freshman Alana Ganz, by just two points.

For his victory, King will receive a $100 Amazon gift card, while Ganz earned $25 in Amazon credit for her second-place finish. As of yet, King has no specific plans for how to spend his windfall.

King said that he follows college basketball pretty closely, but his secret weapon for filling out his bracket was consulting with his brother, a high school junior who, according to King, follows the sport “really intensely.”

“I ran the entire bracket past him, and he made a couple of changes,” King said. “I definitely wouldn’t have done as well without his feedback.”

The advice certainly paid off. Though it may not have been the gutsiest pick, King’s bet on the Wildcats to win the title ultimately earned him bragging rights over some 400 of his peers.

“It’s pretty tough not to choose a team that’s going to have five or six [NBA] draft picks,” King said. “They were the bigger, stronger team, and they had a lot of momentum, so it was kind of silly to choose anyone else.”