I love this time of year. It’s March Madness. Everyone’s filling out brackets, and so many college towns are brimming with anticipation. I love these communities and have an affinity for all things college basketball. I was born in Pac-10 country (Fort Huachuca, Arizona), lived in the epicenter of the Big 10 (Columbus, OH), went to college in Greenville, SC right in the heart of SEC and ACC passion and spent most of my life in New Jersey where the Big East is everything.

Over the last few years, Coldwell Banker has found that more and more people are looking to live in college towns across the country. So as you scurry to fill out your Final Four and research which 5-12 upset to pick, we wanted to give you some insight into the amazing college towns that make up the field of NCAA tournament teams.

Here I present to you the Coldwell Banker Affordability Bracket. Based on the median price of homes that are currently for sale on coldwellbanker.com today, we have updated the NCAA tournament bracket to show you how the tournament field would play out if the matchups were based on which college towns were most affordable.

Ironically, a few of the Final Four teams in the affordability bracket are potentially teams you’d pick in your office pool. But as any good bracket-filler-outer would tell you, you must have some shockers and you’ll find those in here as well (i.e. Duke losing in the first round). I have high hopes for St. Mary’s on the basketball side of things, but with about 50% of the current homes for sale on coldwellbanker.com in Moraga, CA being over a million dollars it forced them to make an early exit in our affordability bracket. On the other hand Ohio schools are well represented from an affordability standpoint. But in the end the Coldwell Banker Affordability Bracket is looking at Syracuse as our tournament winner. Not a bad choice if you ask me.

I’ll be submitting our bracket to ESPN.com’s Tournament Challenge as well as CBSSports.com Bracket Challenge to see how we net out against the actual tournament results. We’ll keep you updated on it’s performance but in the mean time take a look at the Coldwell Banker Affordability Bracket and see how your favorite college town stacks up. Then head on over to the Coldwell Banker College Home Price Comparison Index to do some more digging on the affordability of homes in tons of other college towns across the country.

And good luck with your brackets.