More words than necessary on NCAA pools

My NCAA bracket is ranked only in the 22nd percentile overall. This is poor. I was correct with only 11 of the final 16, and I have only one of the four elite 8 representatives correct so far. I take solace in the fact that any baboon could have successfully picked many correct teams so far since there have been so few upsets. This year, the pools will all be won on the last two rounds, when the little number next to each team becomes irrelevant. I'm quite fine getting trounced by 78% of the United States this year. I'm fine losing to 78% of the field several years. Playing in NCAA tournament pools is not like taking a test in high school. If you get an 85 on a test that score will carry over and affect the average. NCAA pools don't carry over. You either get a 100 or you don't. A series of 85s or 90s is impressive, to be sure, but they're all failures. You might was well have all 0s. I think too many people playing in pools, even the very smart ones, lose sight of this fact. It's hard to turn off the natural human instinct to try to do the best you can. Probabilities work amazingly well over the long run, but they're basically worthless in a small sample size. People who habitually pick the higher seeds in NCAA pools will consistently do well, and that helps to prevent these people from changing their strategy.
I don't have statistically proof to back this up right now, but the best way to win an NCAA pool is to make one or two big guesses that very few other people will make. The reason for this is that if you stick with the seeds like everyone else, then your margin for error slips to virtually zero; you'll have to be right with basically all of your late-tournament picks, something ridiculously hard to do. If instead you single out one unpopular team, then all you need is for that one team to hit for you and you will have close to an even shot at winning. Basically, the odds of your one team coming through for you--even though it must necessarily be an underdog and somewhat of a longer shot--is much better than to hope that a whole sequence of final four and title picks falls in line. Remember that if you play it conservative and do well heading into the last few games, you will still be competing against a large chunk of the pool. and late in the tournament is when you have to start guessing more anyway.
The beauty of my theory is that you have much more freedom outside of your one big guess to go with your gut. And if your gut proves right, then you've just hedged against the possibility that your big guess only ends up half-right. You're narrowing the playing field immensely.
I won a 65-person pool in 2005, and should have won again last year, using this philosophy. 2005 is maybe a bad example because everything hit just perfectly that year, but even still i don't think I had more than 12 Sweet 16 picks right. Last year I picked Memphis to win it all. They were a 1-seed but they were a very unpopular title pick. I may have only gotten 10 Sweet 16 picks and 4-5 Elight 8 picks right, but still if any number of things had happened in the closing minutes of the title game, I'd have won the pool again. In between these efforts, you have years like this one and a couple others where I've finished in the bottom third. It happens. I guess the great unsaid secret in all this is that you have to have a good eye for who these unpopular picks will be that will surpass expectations. This is where I've done well, and the reason I've finished so high in so few years. Memphis was a really good, well-rounded team that was disrespected because of its conference last year. They were easily talented enough to win it all. In 2005, 5-seed Michigan State helped win me the pool by making the Final Four. They were another very talented underrated team that did lots of things well and had my all-time tournament hero coach, Tom Izzo.
Wrapping this up, and perhaps explaining why I'm thinking about all of this right now, I'll remind you of my 22nd percentile standing. I can still win, because I have two potential aces up my sleeve: 4-seed Gonzaga making the Final Four, and 2-seed Michigan State making the title game. If both of these things happen, I will have a better than 50% chance of winning. If only one happens but my other picks are good, I still might have a chance. More than likely, they both won't succeed, and I'll finish 58th out of 75 or something, but maybe they will. And they're both playing tonight.