It’s the question you ask yourself every year when you’re filling out a March Madness bracket: what number should I pick for the final tiebreaker that’s usually the total points that will be scored in the final?
It’s tricky, because you obviously don’t know which teams will be in. Will it be a high-scoring affair or a defense-first kind of contest?
Without that knowledge, we have to revert to what we do know: we can look at past scoring totals, average them together and spit out a number that you can use.
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Let’s look at the past seven point totals from men’s March Madness finals:
2016: 151
2017: 136
2018: 141
2019: 162
2021: 156
2022: 141
2023: 135
That’s an average of 146. So maybe use a number around that one!