March Madness: Analytics are making picking winning brackets easier

SportsPulse: Trysta Krick runs through surprises, snubs and other highlights from Selection Sunday as March Madness officially begins. About one in five Americans will fill out brackets for March Madness, most novices at evaluating men's college hoops. Adobe lent a virtual hand as it launched #HackTheBracket on Monday to give visitors (at no cost) a chance to delve deep into each matchup or just use the technology giant's artificial intelligence-powered engine to predict the winner. "Analytics have been, mostly, for hardcore data heads," Trevor Paulsen, senior product manager for Adobe Analytics Cloud, told USA TODAY Sports. "For the last five of six years, it's been a hobby for some of the engineers here. We built predictive models to see how they'd do internally."