My March Madness bracket fails too early too frequently. After hearing about Nick Dopuch’s CoinFlipBets as a way to determine which teams would win football games, I decided to try my hand at creating a bracket with random selections.

Flipping a coin 63 times isn’t difficult. However, it is error-prone, as it may depend on if you start the coin as heads-up or tails-up and other issues.

So I used the =rand() function in Excel.

The drawback of =rand() is that every time Excel does anything afterward, the cells that contain =rand() produce a new random number.

I decided to run all 63 at once and then copy and paste values.

Because these operations made me lose the first number, I jotted that one down.

I then made an A or B formula where if the random number is great than 0.5 on the 0-to-1 range, show a B; otherwise show an A.

A’s represented the team written physically above its opponent in the bracket. The B’s represented the team written physically below its opponent in the bracket.

The random A or B would determine how I would mark my bracket.

For the championship game between 15 Iona and 8 Loyola Chicago, I divined Loyola Chicago’s score of 72 over Iona’s 68.

As of Friday afternoon, this hasn’t worked perfectly. But there’s a ton of basketball left to play!