While it has been interesting to watch the NCAA basketball tournament, what has really fascinated me is monitoring the brackets. Over 34 million people submitted online bracket guesses! By the end of the first round, only 181 perfect ballots survived, and after the weekend ZERO perfect ballots remained. In fact, there has NEVER been a verifiably perfect submission!
Keep that in mind when you are off on some of your estimates or your projections do not turn out as planned. While many just guess when filling out their brackets, the seedings were done by people who know the sport, teams, and players intimately and were armed with mounds of data about every minute statistic of the season. A group of people put their best thinking together and came up with rankings, yet there is a number 10 seed, two number six seeds, and a five seed in the Sweet Sixteen. If the committee was spot-on, perfect ballots would exist.
You may have all of the empirical information, but it’s impossible to account for the human factor and environmental conditions that more often than not alter the final result. You may be asked to provide revenue estimates, talent projections, or other forecasting scenarios but even with knowledge and data, no perfect outcome can be expected, even from the experts.
