Filling out the perfect NCAA bracket
Published 8:28 am Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Each year filling out that NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket doesn’t get any easier.
Even last season when all four No. 1 seeds reached the Final Four did it get any better.
Looking at each matchup in the first round and then possible second round matchups and so on, makes it all feel like you’re taking a multiple choice exam. Well is Maryland going to beat Cal in the first round? I don’t know, maybe the Terps have some momentum going, OK I’ll take them. Wait, Maryland’s a No. 10 seed and the Bears are a No. 7 seed. Cal has two more wins this season, but the Bears haven’t been in the tournament for a while.
Either way I always come to the conclusion that I should have paid more attention to college basketball during the regular season.
But even then it is next impossible to predict the outcome of 63 games. There are 9,223,372,036,854,780,000 different possibilities with 63 games. Yes, there are favorites, but the odds are slim that anyone will ever pick a perfect bracket.
I did see that there was someone on ebay selling a perfect bracket to anyone willing to bid. The highest bid I saw was for $6 and there was a note saying, ‘The Perfect NCAA Bracket is not guaranteed to be 100 percent perfect.’
I believe the best part of the seller’s description was that they “conservatively” estimated the value of a perfect bracket to be $50,000 and the fact that the bracket was available for sale even before the field was selected.
There are a number of sites that offer multimillion dollar prizes for anyone that picks a perfect bracket, so the seller of ‘The Perfect NCAA Bracket’ is underestimating the value just a bit.
This year’s tournament seems to be one of the toughest to sort through with so many teams claiming the No. 1 spot this season.
While it’d be nice to have a clear-cut favorite, this year there ought to be plenty of upsets and thrillers, especially in the later rounds.
There will be tons of great games and the NCAA tournament is unlike anything else in sports.
So I’ll chip in my $5 and live and die with every game I’ve picked, but mainly I’ll enjoy watching the various storylines that develop as the tournament progresses.