March Madness - Round 1

Yes I did a bracket, like many Americans including the President of the United States, I once again ventured into the world of NCAA bracket pools.  I didn't throw any money at it, so the only thing on the line is pride and pride alone.  Rather than bore you with details about how each and every game turns out and how good or poorly I picked I will stick here with simply recapping each round and go from there.  Since the conclusion of games on Friday ends the tourney's first round, here is a quick recap of how I did.

First Round (32 games)

Record 24-8

Overall record 24-8

Worst first round selection - Georgetown; I had the Hoyas making the Elite 8, they got bounced in the first round of the tournament by Ohio University.  Georgetown (3) is the highest seeded team to lose in the tournament's first round and it wasn't all that close (97-83) and was the worst of the many bad entries from the Big East Conference, who recieved 8 bids to the tournament and saw half of those teams packing their bags after one game. 

Best first round selection - Murray State; Plenty of upsets in the first round of the tournament (St Marys over Richmond, Old Dominion over Notre Dame, Missouri over Clemson, Washington over Marquette,  Wake Forest over Texas, Northern Iowa over UNLV, Georgia Tech over Oklahoma State, Cornell over Temple), but I managed to get a 13/4 upset correct on my bracket entry, having Murray State over Vanderbilt and I had the 12/5 Cornell/Temple upset as well.

Going forward - On the bad side is the Georgetown loss, guaranteeing me at least two more losses in the tournament, but other than that bad pick on my part, the other 7 losses in round one were teams that I didn't have getting out of round 2 anyway, so hopefully those games will not hurt my overall entry too much.  And I do have one perfect region left (West), correctly picking that Syracuse (1), Kansas State (2), Pittsburgh (3), Butler (5), Xavier (6), BYU (7), Gonzaga (8) and Murray State (13) would all make the second round. 

It looks like I wasn't the only one to have Georgetown in the Elite 8, Barack Obama made the same mistake;

 He and I both have Kansas winning the whole tournament as well, actually our entries are similar, though not exactly the same.  The differences between our entries become more pronounced later in the tournament, where he has Kentucky in the final game, I have WVU, and in the final 4 he has Villanova where I have Baylor, but for now he has 14 of his Sweet 16 still around, I have 15 with the only difference being Marquette.