March Madness brackets require a final score in the championship game — here's a good guess for the women's tournament
- March Madness brackets require a score prediction for the championship game of the tournament.
- We determined the average scores of the women's final games over the past 35 years to inform your pick.
March Madness is upon us.
And so is bracket-building season.
But in all the years since the inaugural NCAA Tournament, not one person has come up with a perfect bracket.
Still, college basketball fans are once again coming together in hopes of correctly predicting the outcome of every. single. matchup. And in the end, they'll need to put in a guess for the final score, too.
In the event that the top brackets are equally accurate, all bracket challenges require a score prediction for the championship game to serve as a tiebreaker. And while forecasting the score when the buzzer sounds can be tricky, some quick math based on past Final Fours can make the task a bit less daunting.
We tracked the scores of every March Madness women's final going back to 1988 — the first year that the women's NCAA Tournament included three-point shots — to find the most common result. By determining the average total combined scores and the average margin between the winning and losing team, we were able to estimate the average final NCAA championship game score.
The average total score was 132.1, but we rounded down to 132. Divide by two, and you get an average individual score of 66. The average margin was 12.2, which we rounded down to 12.
Based on those calculations, our best prediction for the score of the NCAA Tournament women's championship game is 72-60.
No guarantees, but we feel pretty good about it.