WHY BACKWARD INDUCTION WORKS.

The objective of a basketball tournament betting pool is to pick the winner, and although the perfect brackets came undone before the round of 64 ended, this year, in the men's tournament at least, it was prudent to bet on the side of the big battalions.

The top two seeds from each region are headed to the Sweet 16 for just the fifth time. One double-digit seed will join them. Most of the Cinderellas that put the madness in March busted out of the bracket long before midnight.

The bluebloods and big boys — many of them, anyway — are going to the regionals and they all want more.

“I didn’t come back to make the Sweet 16,” Purdue big man Zach Edey said after the Boilermakers’ 106-67 victory over Utah State. “I came back to make a run, a deep run. Nobody is satisfied with where we are now.”

Last year’s Final Four was unlike any other, a bracket-busting foursome with no teams seeded better than No. 4 for the first time since the bracket expanded in 1979.

Reigning national champion UConn has looked good in its bid to repeat this year, but there wasn’t a dominant team during the regular season, opening the door for what was expected to be a wild NCAA Tournament.

It didn’t happen.

The upsets that punctuate March have been limited — 13-seed Yale and 12-seeds James Madison and Grand Canyon and 14th-seeded Oakland are all headed home. The only true buzzer-beater was a tying 3-pointer by Texas A&M’s Andersson Garcia to force overtime against Houston. The average margin of victory the first two rounds was 15.8 points, second-highest since 1985.

Read on, though, and note that Big East coaches are still grousing about not getting their fair share of bids.

Usually, the women's tournament is where Them That Has Gets, but this year there's a little turmoil.

It is all chalk on one side of the 2024 NCAA women’s basketball bracket and the other side isn’t looking all that chaotic, either. There have been only two major upsets through the first weekend, one of which knocked out No. 2 seed Ohio State.

Despite that, there weren’t a lot of major winning margins in the second round. The women’s side still hasn’t reached parity from the overall No. 1 seed all the way through to No. 68, but the top 30 or so teams are all relatively even and it showed in the back-and-forth nature of the second round. No. 1 seed Iowa faced a tall task against an underseeded defensive unit, and No. 2 seeds Stanford and UCLA survived scares.

Shed no tears for Ohio State, their women beat Wisconsin for the hockey title, that's where the Pareto distribution seems to be manifesting itself on the ice these days.

That "chalk" locution?  It's apparently a throwback to horse-racing days of long ago, before the Totalisator mechanically updated the odds as the bets were placed.  The bookie whose prior beliefs were best never had to update the odds he was posting: as chalked, as raced.