Reviewing the Best (and Worst) in this Year’s Printable NCAA Tournament Brackets

All I have to type is “NCAA T” into the Google search bar in my Firefox window before I’m met with exactly what Google knows I’m looking for: My very own copy of the 2012 NCAA tournament bracket. Everybody’s doing it from the comfort of their cubicle today. They’re not filing TPS reports, and they’re certainly not following Mitt Romney’s latest campaign stop; they’re swept up in March Madness.

As Kyle Whelliston has warned us, you probably can’t control the urge to be a part of this shared nationwide phenomenon. You have dreams of winning $65 in your office pool, or you think you know who’s upsetting whom, or maybe you just love filling brackets in by hand, as Whelliston does. Whatever the case, there’s a 93 percent chance that already today you’ve Googled (or Bing’d, if you’re that guy) your way to a printable .pdf bracket of this year’s tournament.

And then you were met with millions of results sorted, unhelpully, by every website’s propensity for SEO. More websites than ever are releasing printable brackets awaiting the office deskjets of the working millions.

This is where I’m here to help. Below I have previews, reviews, and links to the best and worst printable brackets out now. I swear they aren’t all the same.

Huffington Post

HuffPo

 

If your search results were like mine, HuffPo was at the very top of the list. No surprise given their reputation for pushing SEO-targeted headlines to the top of search results.

Pros: Simple, clean, monochromatic, and no advertising. This bracket took mere minutes to create in Illustrator or InDesign.
Cons: No times, channels, locations or much of anything — not even win-loss records. Also, no separate brackets for the Tuesday/Wednesday opening-round games.
Rating: 2/5

AP

AP

The AP bracket is clean and a step up informationally from HuffPo. A lot o newspapers use this bracket as a starting point for their own (they just add their graphic at the bottom).

Pros: A simple layout with no advertising with game locations in the left and right margins. Separate bracket for play-in games.
Cons: No game-times or channels. Doesn’t show game locations for the four regional finals.
Rating: 3/5

SBNation

The SBNation bracket is two pages (be warned conspicuous office printers). On the first page is the actual bracket and on the second is a list of each team’s SBNation website (people still type web addresses?).

Pros: No advertising, separate play-in game brackets, “boxed” brackets for writing-impaired, GIANT “National Champion” box for when you get really stoked about the winning team you’ve never had an interest in (don’t must people stop filling in their bracket by then anyway?).
Cons: No win-loss records, no channels, no game times, no game locations, and an annoying color scheme.
Rating: 2/5

ESPN

ESPN

These guys know how to put a bracket together.

Pros: Appealing design and typography, unobtrusive advertising, game locations, win-loss records, and play-in brackets.
Cons: Still no game-times and channels. I can understand the latter, but the former?
Rating: 4/5

Official NCAA

NCAA

Pros: This bracket has everything you can ever want to know. Full TV listings. It’s all there.
Cons: For the sight-impaired … wow, there’s some small text here.
Rating: 5/5

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