The NCAA tournament is upon us, and your bracket is probably already busted. (Thanks, UAB!) Yup, picking basketball teams at this time of year is a crapshoot. But have you ever wondered what the bracket would look like if you picked schools by their median LSAT score?
What’s that? You haven’t wondered that at all? Well, we must have more time on our hands than you do. Probably because you’re studying for the LSAT. So we filled out a whole 64-team bracket based on how a school’s law students did on the LSAT.
A couple of notes:
- Only 42 of the 64 colleges in this year’s field actually have law schools. Any school that doesn’t was disqualified, which led to one first round match in which no winner was declared (pretend they were both disqualified for some stupid NCAA violation).
- Ties were broken using the schools US News and World Report ranking.
Without further adieu, we present to you our MEDIAN MADNESS bracket. (Click to enlarge.)
In the end, it’s no surprise that Harvard takes home the championship. This LSAT juggernaut didn’t even have any close competition, winning its matchups by scores of 12, 19, 12, 13, 7 and 4. It is the Kentucky basketball of this field. Kentucky? Well, it’s sort of the Harvard basketball of this field. How serendipitous.
This year’s Cinderella is definitely Maryland, which made it all the way to the Elite Eight with a median LSAT score of 159. Hard-luck losers include North Carolina and Northeastern, which both lost in the first round despite relatively strong median LSATs of 161. The tightest match of the tourney goes to Duke and Virginia in the Final Four; both schools came in at 169 and are tied for #8 in the newest US News rankings. We had to go back to the 2014 rankings, in which Virginia placed two spots above Duke, to break the tie.
What’s to be learned from this? Well, nothing really. It’s just for funsies. But we’ll check back in once the national champion is crowned in a couple of weeks to see how our bracket stacks up against the real results.
