Dispatches from District 48
Posts tagged ‘final four’
Our winner was Scott Strattner, congratulations! It was a weird year, obviously. Scott won despite getting only one team right out of the final four, though that was pretty much par for the course this year. Here is the top 10:
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I managed to come in 61st, or exactly in the middle. That's actually pretty good since I only got 6 of the sweet-16 right. I lost, though, to every other member of my family.
For the first time in years, we have a winner in our bracket contest even before the Finals are played. Publicity shy Steve Anonymous is the winner, no matter who wins tonight. He has North Carolina to win, but no one with Michigan State is close enough to catch him. Congratulations! As usual, I entered the sweet-16 in the top 10, but then just got crushed on the second weekend. After having 12 of the Sweet-16 correct, I only had 3 of the final 8 correct.
We had 144 brackets entered (thanks everyone!) and this is the distribution of picks. Interestingly, the most popular first round upset pick (excluding 9-8 games) was #10 Maryland over #7 California, with 61% calling the upset. And the majority were right, as Maryland won today over Cal. Overall the picks show an incredible lack of respect for the Pac-10 and the Big-12, with teams like Cal, Washington, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas getting a lot of votes to fall in early to mid round upsets. North Carolina garnered the most picks to win it all, followed by Louisville and Pitt.
Congratulations to Gene Wright, who won the first annual Coyote Blog NCAA bracket contest. Gene only had one of the final four picked (UCLA) but did so well in the opening rounds he had the contest locked up even before last weekend. Second place was Michael Gunter and third was Bob Houk. Interestingly, no one out of 34 contestants had Florida in the finals or winning it all. By the way, yours truly limped in at 24th, though my son helped uphold the family honor at 10th. If you were not in the pool, you can still click here and enter email "coyote -at- coyoteblog -dot- com" and password "coyote" to see all the results.
By the way, I highly recommend the www.pickhoops.com site for your brackets. It costs $9 to set up, but it has no ads, the registration is MUCH less intrusive for your players than free sites like Yahoo, they have great analysis options, and they are much faster at posting results.
