The 3rd Annual NCAA Nerd-Off Rules:

This year, in the interest of shifting the labor burden from the Nerd Council to the participants, you will be running your own program and filling in the standard bracket that will be provided by the Nerd Council.

The competitor brackets will be uploaded to the website as soon as possible, so you can compare your brackets to those of your enemies. Late submissions will not be accepted, so please make sure your program runs cleanly before submission.

Please keep the bios and abstracts relatively clean, as we may deny those deemed inappropriate for publication. 

Since this year you are now running your own programs, you are free to use any programming languages that you would like. However, please abide by the honors system and submit the bracket your program generates on the first run, do not run several times and bias your picks by which you personally prefer.

Your submission must include your picks in the standardized spreadsheet, such that we can easily incorporate it into our master scoring file. The spreadsheet will be provided on the website immediately after Selection Sunday. Further, a short abstract describing the model (less than 150 words) and a short bio (under 100 words) are optional, and may be published along with your results.

You must fill in your own data sheets. It is a good idea to get a start on this before Selection Sunday (roughly 36 hours before submissions are due), as you should have a fairly good idea of who many of the teams will be before then.

Your model must include some random component. More specifically, ANY OUTCOME ALLOWED BY THE BRACKET FORM MUST BE ATTAINABLE BY YOUR MODEL, i.e. assuming they make the tournament, there must be some positive probability that the model selects Gardner-Webb as its champion. Yes, even Gardner-Webb.

Please adhere to the Spirit of the Competition. We understand that you are all capable of writing a model which gives said Gardner-Webb championship a probability of 0.00000001, but that’s not very interesting. The goal should always be to create the best model possible, despite realizing that there is a very good chance that the ‘best’ model will not be the one who best predicts the eventual outcome (that one is the ‘luckiest’ model… a term which will come in handy when our girlfriends beat us by choosing teams based on jersey color…yeah, right, like Nerd Council members can get girlfriends). Respect and embrace the randomness, even if your model spits out something ridiculous that would never happen…like George Mason in the Final Four. In short, people are putting blood, sweat, some tears, and very scarce grad student free time into this; don’t be a jerk.

Yes, you have predict the play-in game.

You will receive 1/2 a point for correctly predicting the play-in game, 1 point for correctly predicting the teams which make the 2nd round, 2 points for the teams that make the Sweet Sixteen, 4 for the teams that make the Elite Eight, 8 points for the teams that make the Final Four, 16 points for the teams that make the Championship, and 32 points for correctly predicting the NCAA Champion.

Cost of entry is free, and thus, this is not gambling. This year the Nerd-Off is solely for pride, though if you or anyone you know would like to donate a prize, please let us know. If you choose to make side bets within your department/social network, that’s on your own.

It is your responsibility to spread the word about this competition! The more people we can get involved, the better the competition will be.