In Buzzy’s Country Store yesterday, my buddy Pat Woodburn and I were discussing NCAA Tournament action and had no sooner said “Well, no upsets yet,” when Number 11 seed Duquesne defeated Number 6 BYU. (This would be the first of 3 Number 11 seeds beating a 6 yesterday. If you are a gambling person, New Mexico is the 4th 11 seed in the Tourney and they play 6 seed Clemson today. The Vegas boys are on this however, and have New Mexico as a 2 1/2 point favorite which is very unusual for an 11th seed to be such. If you have contrarian gambling blood in you, this may be the time to take the 2 1/2 and ride the Tigers. Jes saying.
Out of 22-plus million entries into ESPN’s Bracket Challenge, 1,825 of those entries are still perfect (click here.) That means they all had the three 11 seed upsets as well as the shocker of the day/night Oakland beating Kentucky – pretty amazing.
Side note here – another nice thing about the NCAA Tournament is hearing and learning about colleges, players and coaches that you knew little to nothing about previously. For instance, last night as I watched the Oakland-Kentucky game, I kept wondering why I had never heard about a college by that name from Oakland, California. Well, that’s because my California assumption was incorrect and they are actually located in Rochester, Michigan. Too, their coach has a very interesting back story written by John Feinstein a couple days ago as if he knew something (click here.)
The ESPN Tournament Challenge permits you to submit up to 25 entries. On one of mine, I only had two wrong yesterday, Kentucky being one of them and South Carolina the other. I consulted the ESPN Leaderboard just now thinking I might be somewhere in the upper rankings only to learn that at 693,268 I got nothing to feel good nor brag about.
But, just because I got no life and do find mindless pursuits like these amusing, I took the liberty of cloning three other ESPN brackets and submitted them as my own in the Challenge. ESPN not only allows this, but also makes it very easy to do by letting you simply click on the Clone button and it automatically populated the brackets for you. My kind of entry system.
Given the ease of doing so, I figured I’d “waste” three of my 25 bracket entries on the following guys for comparison purposes. Here is how they did on their picks entered under my name. (Please overlook my lousy handwriting.)
Keep in mind that Steven A. and Jay are supposed to know what they are talking about since they do this sports talking thing for a living. As for the Biden guy, him ranking at 45.5% in the ESPN Challenge seems like it mirrors his current Presidential approval rating doesn’t it? In Joe’s defense however, do give him some credit for correctly picking Kentucky to not be advancing in the tournament’s future rounds.
So today, the second round commences and again the Buzzy Sports bar will have it dialed in and monitoring all of the action. Number 1 overall seeded Connecticut takes on 16th seeded Stetson in an early game. The Huskies are favored by 26 1/2 points. Wouldn’t it be something……
However, it was the other Steven (as in Tyler) who said it best:
Capitol Center 1978 – some of you may have been there. If so, see if you see yourself in the crowd shots.