The Perfect Bracket
This is hardly thread worthy but I thought it was interesting..
So out of 20 million plus brackets filled out on ESPN there's one perfect one left. I hope he's right.
http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/en/entry?entryID=…
But his disclaimer disarmed me...
I hope he's right about half of the title game, but I want to see ND knocked out by Iowa State tonight.
Do you get anything for having the least perfect bracket? My West Region is nothing but red.
I wasn't aware that Dantonio ever taught 8th grade. Interesting.
How can you say the best bracket in the country is a joke? It's all about luck. There's no predicting what will happen in the late rounds any more than you can predict the early rounds. IF the big boys are in the final 4 they pretty much always win. That's just about the only sure thing in the tournament, and even that doesn't come true 100% of the time (see Butler in whatever year that was that they were in the final). If you really knew what is and isn't a joke you would probably have the perfect bracket instead of this guy wouldn't you?
Actually, statistically speaking, the later rounds tend to be easier to pick than the earlier ones.
He's about to lose that if Colorado loses
If Illinois hangs on, he might lose his perfection. However, it's his end result that matters most.
He has Marquette in the final Four. Of course he is wrong.
but srs, that would be amazing.
I hope he is right but my BIG rooting dies after the sweet 16 (except for Michigan). I want as many BIG teams to go to the sweet 16 then I don't care. Go Blue! Beat VCU!
I guess to each his own, but that's when rooting for the Big Ten means the most, IMO. Illinois beating Colorado only to lose to Miami means very little. But having a team or two in the Final Four is big and having one win it all is huge.
A big knock against us is that the Big Ten has won so few national titles lately. Does it hurt Michigan for another Big Ten team to win the tourney? Kids like to play in the best leagues against the best teams. In basketball, there is so much less head-to-head recruiting that it really doesn't matter, and it helps everyone in the conference when its teams are winning.
That, and the conference makes more money, which gets shared with Michigan.
annnnnd its gone!
colorado goes down.
And this, kids, is what we call a liar.
You picked Harvard over New Mexico, huh?
And La Salle over KSU!
or whatever you want to call brackets made to fit a certain role (this one is "Best March Ever") that has Harvard over New Mexico, Cal over UNLV and Saint Louis over New Mexico State. That said, it has Cincinnati and Pitt in the Final Four and Duke, MSU and OSU losing in the first round, so it's not like that's an accurate attempt to pick the field, more of a coincidence than anything else.
This just goes to show how much filling out brackets is a crap shoot. Congrats on 22/22, but that bracket is terrible.
/endbitterrant
Well now that Illinois pretty much won this one, there is one perfect bracket left on yahoo.
Is ESPN having the new Pope do a bracket now?
One in TSN's pool as well (they run their's using ESPN's accounts).
http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/en_CA/entry?entry…
This one has 3 Big East teams in the Final 4.
What I think is funny is that If the people with perfect brackets had shown their picks before the tourny started they would've been laughed at by anybody who knows anything about basketball.
To have a perfect bracket you basically have to know NOTHING about the teams playing or there is no way you'd select all the games right.
A few years ago my daughter, who knows less about basketball than I do Japanese, asked me "what colors do team X wear?" She was filling out a bracket for a FaceBook challenge and made all of her selections based on which color uni's she liked the best. I laughed my ass off as her picks made zero sense to me (Butler in the finals? yeah right) but she sent it in anyways without my expertise.
She finished in the top 10 of all people submitting.
This would have been more persuasive were you not a scholar in Japanese.
March 23rd, 2013 at 12:52 AM ^
If these people really "knew so much about college basketball," they probably wouldn't have been laughing. To guess all the upsets, you have to be lucky, not stupid.
Someone calculated the chance of getting a bracket 100% right at 1 in 7 trillion.
But it doesn't account for standard basketball logic, like No. 1 seeds always advancing in the first round or tournament champions usually having a top-four seed or Duke's dual advantage of having a legend like Coach K and never getting called for a blocking foul. If you know something about the NCAA tournament, the odds of a perfect bracket are more like 1 in 128 billion. (That's according to DePaul math professor Jay Bergen.)
Using that number, if everyone in the United States filled out a bracket, we'd see a perfect one every 400 years.
Hasta el culoooooo!
March 22nd, 2013 at 11:53 PM ^
I wonder if Mr Perfect Bracket guy thought Georgetown would lose to the vaunted and long-standing basketball power Florida Gulf Coast
My bracket is so fucked now that I'm just rooting for ALL THE UPSETS! FGCU!!! GREATEST UNIVERSITY EVER!!!
No longer perfect, Georgetown just lost to Florida Gulf Coast.
Ed: Also Illinois beat Colorado.
Root for Kansas to lose tonight. Michigan win tomorrow...final 4.
If Kansas loses I'd piss my pants. No 16 seed has ever beaten a 1 seed and that makes a final four run very likely for Michigan.
Of course, nothing matters if we don't beat VCU tomorrow.
And with FGCU's win, down goes the final victor.
March 22nd, 2013 at 10:18 PM ^
Every year I get so amped and my love for this time of year comes out full steam, the brackets being part of the love for March Madness. Then Saturday and Sunday come, each year, and I realize how much emotional waste I've built up in hopes for being the ultimate bracket builder and succumb to minor depression while people with absolutely no clue ride these ridiculously lucky brackets. Such a rollercoaster time of year.