BlueFuego

March Madness is upon us, and 68 teams have been reduced to the Sweet 16, with games tonight determining the Elite 8.  We’ve seen our fair share of  buzzer beaters and bracket busters already, but we got to thinking at BlueFuego… what if the tournament were decided according to the BlueFuego Formula?

The BlueFuego formula has been run across over 355,000 individual Facebook Page posts for over 1,200 college and university main fan pages in the past 23 months.  It’s our way of determining engagement on a Page, and we’ve manually pulled the data on every single post.

Here’s the formula: (Comments + Likes per post) / # of Fans

(Click Photo to Enlarge)

Facebook Pages are a great indicator of how engaged a university is with its online community, and how the community/fans react to the content that’s being posted.  Using the combined engagement percentage of January and February 2011 for the top-level university page for each of the 68 teams, here is how the NCAA Bracket shapes up to the Sweet 16. (On April 1, we’ll pull the March data and use that to determine the rest of the tournament.)

- Of the #1 seeds, only Duke loses in the first round.

- Butler, Kentucky, North Carolina, Arizona, Duke, Connecticut, Richmond, VCU, Florida State, and BYU are all winning on the court, but fell out in the 2nd round of our bracket. (Yeah, we’d rather be winning on the court vs. Facebook too.)

- Of the actual Sweet 16 teams, only 5 (Ohio St., Marquette, SDSU, Kansas and Wisconsin) make it to the Sweet 16 in our bracket.

- Only 4 of the 16 third round games matched our bracket.

BlueFuego Bracket: Sweet 16 (Click to Enlarge)