NCAA bracket: 3 strangest ways 2025 March Madness winners were picked

The NCAA basketball tournaments have finally arrived, and that means it’s time to create a bracket or two.

Unfortunately, sports outcomes are almost entirely random and none of us can truly know what’s going to happen. As such, some people have decided to try alternative means of putting together brackets. Let’s celebrate that. Here are three of the weirdest ways people have arranged their March Madness brackets in 2025.

Using ChatGPT

Perhaps the most 2025 way to put together a March Madness bracket is to use ChatGPT, which is what our colleague Nelson Aguilar over at CNET (Note: Mashable and CNET are owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis) did. The concept here is fairly straightforward, so I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty details, but one humorous thing to note is that the initial bracket ChatGPT put together didn’t have the right teams in it.

Another thing to mention is that ChatGPT’s bracket is almost entirely chalk. There are only a handful of upset picks in it, which means ChatGPT is a coward.

Going by mascots

Perhaps the easiest and most fun way to figure out who you like in any sporting event is to go by team mascots. Everyone loves the big stupid cartoon characters that roam basketball sidelines! Thankfully, the NCAA March Madness app seems to have a mascot-based picking system for people who don’t actually care about basketball.

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There’s also a shockingly detailed and thorough article about this on the NCAA’s website. Anyway, my pick for the national champion based solely on this criteria would be the Wofford Terriers.

Asking your dog

Lastly, as is very common with big sporting events, people are asking their animal companions for help. Animals don’t know anything about sports, but in fairness, neither do most people who watch sports. And knowing things is overrated anyway, considering the outcomes of these games have very little to do with the seasons the teams have had up to this point.

All it takes is a cursory TikTok search to find people polling dogs to build their brackets. It’s adorable and can’t be any worse than the brackets you make yourself.