You, Too, Can Fill Out Your March Madness Bracket Based On the Number of Nearby Factory Jobs

What could go wrong?

The NCAA basketball tournaments start this week! Productivity at work goes down, vasectomies go up (that’s right), and your favorite team – unless you’re a fan of frontrunners like Duke – is probably going to lose quickly. Mine always does, when it occasionally makes it! Anyway, you should fill out a bracket, if for no other reason than: You could win a prize.

What you shouldn’t do is let a lack of college basketball knowledge keep you from doing it. First of all, it’s almost statistically impossible to get a bracket right; second, there are always upsets (sometime they get their own Wikipedia articles); third, the guy in your office pool who claims to know what he’s talking about (this is me) likely doesn’t.

You don’t need to know about KenPom rankings, or matchups, or which team has the better frontcourt. You’ll probably do no worse than average if you make your picks based on who has the best mascot (regrettably, this is probably Purdue) or who’s got the best student manager (McNeese State by a mile).

So let’s explore another option:

Do it like the Alliance for American Manufacturing does and fill out your bracket based on the number of factory jobs nearest to each college or university.

This is hardly an exact science. But, thanks to U.S. Census Bureau data, we can look up employment numbers for each congressional district and then assign those numbers to each school based on its declared zip code. And, yes, while many districts are incredibly gerrymandered, and while this kind of 10,000-foot view doesn’t provide granular detail into what affects employment trends in regional manufacturing industries, it does give you a decent idea of what the industrial landscape looks like across the United States.

So what kind of bracket will you get if you pick by headcount? The number of manufacturing jobs in the district that each school calls home? For argument’s sake, I took a look at how the men’s bracket would shake out:

You get two 16 seeds winning their first-round matchups – SIU Edwardsville over Houston and Norfolk State over Florida – and a Final Four that includes Akron (from Ohio’s 4^th district, which has a long established manufacturing footprint and almost 56,000 factory jobs, and whose school mascot is named for a rubber overshoe once manufactured across town by B.F. Goodrich Co.) and Arkansas (in that state’s 3^rd district, which has a lot of food processing plants, adding up to 52,500). To get there, the Razorbacks edge out the villainous UConn Huskies, from Connecticut’s 2^nd District (52,200 jobs, lots in aerospace and shipbuilding) in the Elite Eight.

Fifteen-seed Wofford College – in South Carolina’s 4^th District, which has more than 56,000 factory jobs, according to the 2023 American Community Survey – would be in the Final Four too, if it wasn’t in the same bracket as Clemson, our baffling national champion. Clemson basketball?! But it’s right next door to Wofford, in South Carolina’s 3^rd district, which is home to almost 76,000 factory jobs. It tracks that these schools are so powerful in this specific exercise: Upstate South Carolina, where they are located, is a huge auto manufacturing hub.

The bracket changes slightly if you make your picks not on factory job totals but on manufacturing’s share of overall employment. In that case, the hated Connecticut (boo!) beats Arkansas to continue its quest for three championships in a row. But a lot of the bracket remains the same. Houston and Florida both still lose, as does St. John’s in its 15-2 matchup against the University of Nebraska Omaha (because, relatively speaking, there’s not a lot of manufacturing happening in Queens, New York in 2025). Michigan and Michigan State do well because both are in districts with large manufacturing footprints, as does Purdue (53,000 jobs), Auburn (52,700), Iowa State (62,000), Marquette (57,700) and High Point University (59,000).

Realistically, we’re probably not gonna get as many upsets as these manufacturing numbers would predict. But March Madness is still the arguably the best sporting event of the year. Wall-to-wall, high-stakes basketball all weekend! Lots of surprises! I once lost $20 on Roy Hibbert and the Georgetown Hoyas in the Final Four! I once had an IT guy at a previous job dress me down for “suckin’ up all the Internet bandwidth” by watching the games nonstop on my office computer! I once paid $80 to sit in the nosebleeds of the 76ers arena in Philadelphia and watch Indiana (go Hoosiers!) get blown out by North Carolina (boo!) in the Sweet 16!

In fact, this is as good a way to fill out a March Madness bracket as any other, so this is how I’ll be doing my own this season with one alteration: I’m taking Akron to win it all. Go Zips!

Here’s the full bracket by manufacturing employment totals (in the congressional district in which each team is based):

And here’s the full bracket by manufacturing’s share of total employment (in the congressional district in which each team is based):