Is your NCAA bracket on life support? You're not alone - CNET

Here's my sliver of pride in forecasting this year's March Madness touament: I've got more teams in the Final Four than Bing Predicts.

I've got two teams - North Carolina and Oklahoma - still standing as we head into this weekend's games. Microsoft's forecasting engine, by contrast, has just Carolina.

Of course, that's cold consolation for one of the wackiest NCAA men's basketball touaments I can remember. Bing and I both saw our brackets busted on second day, when Michigan State shockingly lost. (Thanks Middle Tennessee State.) Perennial favorite Kansas also bowed out last weekend, spelling doom for our brackets, as well as those of countless Jayhawks fans around the country.

So much for pouring over analytics and parsing the reports of countless college basketball analysts, former players and buddies. It doesn't matter what your system is or how much computing power you have. The simple truth is bracketology isn't much more than a crapshoot. An informed crapshoot at best.

For a sense of how tough it is to pick the winners, consider this factoid: just 1,140 of the record-setting 13 million brackets submitted to ESPN's Touament Challenge got the final four right. Yes, just 0.009 percent of the submissions chose North Carolina, Oklahoma, Villanova and Syracuse.