The sound you just heard was that of my bracket ripping – a common occurrence during the NCAA’s Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games last week, to be sure.
In all my years of filling out brackets, I’ve never seen the pool winner decided before the last weekend of action. I’ve never seen so few people select so few Final Four teams.
But that is the beauty and allure of March Madness. She is a savage beast that always delivers the unexpected, the Cinderella story and the inevitable frustrated feeling of wasted time watching basketball games you normally wouldn’t.
The outcome of April 4’s championship game doesn’t even matter at this point, because the 2011 NCAA tournament will be remembered for the shocking run of Virginia Commonwealth University.
The No. 11-ranked team in the Southwest bracket wasn’t even supposed to be in the tournament. Basketball experts on all the major forums were slamming its selection to the field.
They weren’t supposed to beat USC in the new at-large play-in game; nobody thought they could beat No. 3 Purdue (let alone by 18 points); only a few people could have seen them beating Florida State (a win that brought me on-board as a bandwagon fan); and only dreamers in the team’s hometown of Richmond, Va., could have seen them beating Kansas to earn a berth in the Final Four.
In fact, only two people out of the 5.9 million in ESPN.com’s bracket challenge correctly picked all of the Final Four teams. I tried punching that into my calculator to figure out a percentage and an error message came up.
In our City View office pool, nobody had the winner and only two people even had one of the Final Four teams: publisher Cam Christianson with Connecticut and editor Nathan Anderson with Kentucky.
So, congratulations (and reluctant apologies, due to my insult of his quick picks and my second-last place finish) go out to Anderson for claiming the prize. His difference-maker was the Kentucky Wildcats’ win over the No. 1 overall Ohio State Buckeyes (which, in hindsight, I really enjoyed).
Apparently, he thought of also picking VCU and Butler in the national semifinal, but didn’t have time to make the adjustment during the three minutes he spent filling out his bracket.
But there in lies the lesson to be learned looking ahead to the 2012 edition of March Madness: if the highly-paid talking heads on TV, who spend hours analyzing every match up and possible scenario, can fail so epically, maybe only spending three minutes on it was the right decision after all.
