So, I've created this spreadsheet to track our office NCAA Tournament Bracket Pool. (It's a government office, so this pool is strictly for bragging rights, NO MONEY CHANGING HANDS, just in case the NSA is reading over my shoulder.)
Spreadsheet: https://www.brinkleys.org/users/tsl/Files/2019-Brackets.xlsx
The spreadsheet works like this:
Sheet 1 (Standings) - shows total score for each entrant, round scores, pulled from NCAA Results sheet
Sheet 2 (NCAA Results) - pulldowns for each game in the tournament, as each game is played, select the winner, and those winners show in the choices for the next round of games, etc., also has round scores for each team, scores on right are pulled from appropriate EntryX sheet, with the name of the sheet in the box so that references don't need to be recreated as sheets are copied and deleted each year
Sheet 3 (Setup) - inputs for the teams and pod locations
Sheet 4 (BlankEntry) - blank entry sheet, duh, spaced out nicely for nice viewing...scores tabulated in columns A, C, E, G, etc., entries in B, D, F, H, etc., round results tabulated in column K, which are shown on NCAA Results sheet
Sheet 5 and beyond (EntryX) - each pool member's bracket, entered by pulldown in the same manner as NCAA Results page, with tabulated results in column K reported back to NCAA Results sheet (and from there to Standings sheet)
This spreadsheet has evolved over several years (first iteration was in 2007, but I don't update it every year). The formulas in it are based on a scoring paradigm that rewards picking the right upsets, which is adding the seed to the number of points you get for each round. Example: 2 points for picking the first round correct, plus the seed, would have awarded 18 points for correctly picking UMBC over Virginia last year.) So adding the seed to the points is baked in to the algorithms at this point. I want to back that out to make it selectable, but I figured I would ask what other suggestions you would have to making this a generic tournament pool tracker. Some of the thoughts I've had were:
- Adding a flag for adding the seed value to score for each game
- Adding the ability to clear all choices on the entry page when clearing entries at the beginning of the tournament
- Adding the ability to show possible points to gain (would be zero if all final four teams were knocked out)
Would love some additional suggestions to work on after this tournament. Don't think I have time between now and then to update the sheet in any major way.
Thoughts?
