Last month, NCAA basketball was on the national spotlight due to the annual March Madness tournament. As I do every year, I filled out brackets to try and correctly guess the outcome of the tournament. Like most people, I created more than one bracket to try and boost my near impossible odds of getting a perfect bracket. I joined a league which included my mom, dad, brother and myself and another league which consisted of my friends from OU. After the round of 64 concluded, I was checking the bracket standings in the league with my friends and began to notice that many of us had similar brackets. To get a better understanding of just how similar our brackets were I complied all the entries from the league and put them into Excel. I quickly realized my suspicions were true, our brackets were strikingly similar. I compared the different teams each user had picked to make it to the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, Final Four, and National Championship game. It became clear to me that the higher seed was picked nearly every time, with very little variation between each user in the league. Afterwards, I did the same analysis with my family league. While many of us selected the same teams to reach the Sweet Sixteen and beyond, I noticed something different about my family league. The teams that my family members and I were picking were much more ambitious. For instance, nobody in the league with my friends had a seed lower than six making it to the Sweet Sixteen or beyond. However, in the league with my family, many of us had double-digit seeded teams reaching the Sweet Sixteen and beyond. I believe that the reason the picks were much more “out there” in the league with my family as opposed to the league with my friends was because of groupthink. With competition between friends, I am susceptible to much more criticism for bad picks as opposed to a bracket challenge between members of my own family. I believe this is what led to me and my friends being so timid in our predictions, we simply did not want to be ridiculed for picking a lower-seeded team and being wrong. I intend to elaborate on this theory by doing more in-depth analysis on the two leagues to determine what may have caused the differences between the entries.