How To Win Your 2026 March Madness Bracket Pool (Episode 967 with Mike Leone, Alex Hardin, Jack Miller & Jason Lisk)
Establish The Run Fantasy Football
Fantasy Football
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
PoolGenius' Jason Lisk joins ETR's Mike Leone, Alex Hardin and Jack Miller to break down the 2026 NCAA Tournament Bracket and provide all the information you need to take down your March Madness Bracket & Survivor Pools.
Links mentioned in the episode:
- Subscribe to PoolGenius With ETR Exclusive Promo Codes
- 2026 March Madness Bracket Pool Strategy
- Establish The Run College Basketball Ball
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
0:51 - General Strategy 101
10:47 - Overplayed Teams In Sharp Pools Compared To Regular Pools
14:00 - Why Is Florida the Weakest of the #1 Seed?
17:26 - Important Injuries To Factor
20:05 - How Strong Are This Year’s #1 Seeds?
24:25 - Most Underrated Teams
29:21 - Most Overrated Teams
33:25 - Picking Between Playstyle Preferences
35:27 - East Region Breakdown
41:26 - West Region Breakdown
46:44 - Midwest Region Breakdown
50:01 - South Region Breakdown
55:50 - Our Picks To Win
1:01:10 - Survivor Pools Strategy
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Establish to Run podcast, episode 967. |
| 0:21.4 | That is my horrible version of the Adam Levitan intro. |
| 0:26.4 | But we are here. |
| 0:27.6 | I am Mike Leone, bringing you the ETR College Basketball, Brackett, March Madness Podcast. |
| 0:34.1 | Join with some special guests, Alex and Jack from ETR. |
| 0:37.6 | Also have Jason from Pool Genius to break down strategy for your bracket pools, whether |
| 0:44.2 | it's a casual contest or playing some sharper high stakes stuff. |
| 0:47.3 | We'll also touch on Survivor a little bit. |
| 0:51.2 | So first, I'll throw it to Jason if you want to talk a little bit about like just |
| 0:56.4 | general strategy for bracket pools. And I know like obviously knowing your your pool format is |
| 1:03.4 | really important and how those things can kind of dictate how you're going to approach filling |
| 1:07.9 | out your bracket. Yeah. If we're talking basic 101 to get a decent shot, right? |
| 1:16.1 | Because people will say, oh, you can win by picking the mascot. |
| 1:19.7 | Sure. |
| 1:20.5 | If you pick, you know, teams like the Connecticut Huskies is the best mascot, |
| 1:26.7 | if you happen to time that right, |
| 1:28.1 | but you're probably not doing that as a general rule, and you can get edge. So you want to look |
| 1:34.0 | at things like your pool size. How aggressive do I need to be with certain picks based on how many |
| 1:38.9 | people I've got to be? How many payout spots there are? That's a key one. Scoring is a huge |
| 1:43.9 | one. Like ES is a huge one. |
| 1:44.5 | Like ESPN has their standard scoring. |
| 1:47.6 | Picks in the first round are worth one. |
... |
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