Simulate the 2022 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

See results and storylines of March Madness 2022 before it happens 😉

2 min readMar 15, 2022

Two years ago, on Friday, March 12th, 2020, the NCAA Men’s March Madness basketball tournament was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. To fill the void, many fans, myself included, simulated how the tournament would have turned out. I was pleasantly surprised by the positive reception my simulation received from some of the best in the industry.

I re-built the simulation for last year’s 2021 tournament and this year I’m doing it again.

To try it out yourself, make a copy of this Google Sheet for the 2022 March Madness simulation (Google account required) and simply check the “Simulate Tournament” checkbox on the primary “Bracket” sheet. The bracket will automatically fill and a champion will be crowned. Scroll around the full bracket to see how the madness played out in the simulation, or simply read the dynamically-generated top story lines. Uncheck and re-check the checkbox to run the simulation as many times as you’d like.

Simulating the 2022 men’s college basketball tournament. Make a copy of the Google Sheet to run the simulation yourself.

To learn how the simulation works, and all the nerdy behind-the-scenes math, read my original post from 2020. In short, it uses the real NCAA bracket and then simulates each round of the tournament based on KenPom ratings by generating random numbers weighted to the win probability of each team in a given game.

Enjoy exploring the future!

Before You Go…

If you liked this post, you may also like my other posts about sports and data — give me a follow to be notified when I post more:

Simulate the 2022 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

See results and storylines of March Madness 2022 before it happens 😉

Before You Go…

Written by David Glidden