As a teen who enjoys watching college basketball, March Madness is the greatest time of the school year. There is no better feeling than being crowded around a computer screen with your friends hoping that the team you picked wins so you can maintain your perfect bracket. March Madness is a college basketball tournament, created in 1939, consisting of 64 teams. 32 of these teams make the tournament by winning their conference tournament and the rest are decided by the NCAA tournament committee. The tournament has 4 regions, North, South, East, and West. The teams are divided up into these regions and seeded based on their record and other statistics.
Every year, millions of people fill out a bracket from all over the world hoping that it will be perfect. Up to this point, nobody has come close to a perfect bracket, and nobody ever will. It is said that the odds of creating a perfect bracket is 1 in 9.2 quintillion. There are an estimated 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth. If I picked one at random and had you guess which of the 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on the planet it was, your odds of being correct would be 23% better than your odds of picking a perfect bracket. Upsets are a big reason that making a perfect bracket is so tough.
I am in a bracket with many of my friends. We all placed 5 dollars and each person could make 2 brackets. In my first bracket, I picked Texas to win the whole thing and after the first weekend, I sat in 3rd, just 2 points out of first place in the 43 made brackets for our group. Althought Texas and UCONN were both in, my other two final four picks, Marquette and Arizona, had both been eliminated. That doesn’t affect my bracket too much because I am the only person who predicted Texas to win in this group, meaning if Texas won the National Championship then I should be the outright winner. I picked UCLA to win my second bracket and I sat in 14th place, just 5 points out of first. In this bracket, 3 of my final 4 picks were still correct going into the Sweet 16. I had chosen Xavier, Alabama, UCLA, and Duke. Duke has been eliminated.
Texas was eliminated last weekend, meaning that both my brackets have been busted. I finished just a couple points out of 1st place with Trace Fricke taking 1st overall. This may have been one of the hardest final fours to predict with only 7 out of 20 million brackets predicting the correct final four.
Florida Atlantic’s magical run came to an end against San Diego State when they lost on a game-winning shot. Miami’s run also came to an end with a 13-point loss to UCONN. UCONN beat San Diego State and won the tournament with a dominant 17-point victory. This run will solidify them as one of the better teams of all time to win the tournament. UCONN won each game by an average of 20.7 points.