March does not only mark the beginning of spring, for many around the United States March means bracket season.

With the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments coming to a close, that inherently means lots of people will be left with thoughts of what could have been if only they picked a game or two differently.

The NCAA estimates that between 60-100 million brackets are created every year, yet there is no documented perfect bracket that has been filled out since the NCAA adopted the current format for its division I basketball tournament in 1985. This, combined with the swarms of people who do start following college basketball in March leads to innovative strategies for filling out what could possibly be the perfect bracket.

“I personally don’t have any strategies for filling out the brackets,” Michael Ward said, “I have a friend who picks her whole bracket based on the mascots of the schools. I don’t follow college basketball very closely, but I watch the tournament.”

Ward’s friend is not alone, all sorts of interesting tactics are employed by people each year trying to make the best bracket to brag about to friends and family.

“I’m not the type of person to get super creative with picking teams, the strangest thing I’ll do is use which team’s mascot is cooler as a tiebreaker for games that are tough to pick,” Robert Sutton said. “The most interesting strategy I have heard somebody do was pick all the games based on which mascot they thought would win in a fight, but that one gets tough when you have to start considering mythical creatures. We have a family bracket pool, so some of my family members that don’t follow sports use some other strategies like picking the team with the better color scheme, or a lot of times just picking games as quickly as they can.”

“I make multiple brackets most years, usually I find that the brackets that do the best are the ones where I don’t think about match ups and just pick who wins,” Blake Maes said. “I don’t have any local schools that are good enough to consistently make it, but I know friends who are fortunate enough to have that and they always pick local schools to win. The weirdest strategy I guess I have heard of would be a cousin who picked a team because she thought they had a good looking player, other than that I only really know of people who pick based on colors or (which team has) cooler logos.”

One evolution in the world of college basketball is the growing audience for women’s basketball.

“I was never very interested in making brackets or really watching women’s tournament games because UConn would win easily each year, and there just wouldn’t be many upsets in general,” Sutton said, “I actually follow some of the bigger games this year because of (Caitlin) Clark and find their games can be really fun (to watch).”

“This was the first year where I made a bracket for the women’s tournament,” Maes said, “I don’t know hardly anything about most of the teams, so I just kind of end up picking the higher seeds almost every time.”

Sutton and Maes weren’t alone in their newfound interest in women’s college basketball. The rematch of last season’s national championship between LSU and Iowa saw an average of 12.3 million viewers throughout the game, that is more than each game of Major League Baseball’s world series and all but one game of the NBA finals last season.