It's Been Fun, It's Been Real

Our bracket contest is nearly completed. I'm always bummed when the final weekend of games arrives, however it's 48 more short weeks until the next bracket contest begins. We sadly have three games remaining with eight tournament scenarios left. There are only four teams that have not been eliminated: Florida, UConn, Wisconsin, Kentucky

The semi-final games are Saturday on TBS, not CBS!! With the championship match up Monday, this time on CBS.

Florida #1 vs UConn #7 at 6:09 ET
Kentucky #8 vs Wisconsin #2 at 8:49 ET

Our best guessers had only two of the last four teams selected correctly, only ten of you did that. There were a ton of one correct out of four, and a real small number that had zero correct.

After the first weekend of games, I was away for my 20th wedding anniversary vacation and had the current standings on autopilot. Aside from my pick sheet, all went as planned. I did get to see a few of the games, but not enough to create a blog post about it. A big thank you to my wife, yet again, for putting up with this tournament during our anniversary week. I just cannot convince the NCAA to move the March tournament to dates that don't interfere with my anniversary. I'm kidding, my wife actually will sit and watch the games with me because I enjoy it so much.

If you haven't looked at the payouts for this year, the link is here on the Tournament Payouts Page. There are five winners this year. I will send the payouts as soon as I contact the winners to determine how they want to be paid.

As I mentioned, there are exactly eight tournament scenarios remaining, they are as follows:

If Florida beats Wisconsin
If Wisconsin beats Florida
If Florida beats Kentucky
If Kentucky beats Florida
If UConn beats Wisconsin
If Wisconsin beats UConn
If UConn beats Kentucky
If Kentucky beats UConn

Best of luck to ya people!

Saturday's Games

Two games tonight, #1 Louisville versus #9 Wichita State at 6:00 EST and #4 Syracuse versus #4 Michigan at 8:50 EST.

With that, having only four teams remaining means there are only eight outcomes in the bracket contest. They are as follows:

If Louisville beats Michigan
If Michigan Beats Louisville
If Louisville beats Syracuse
If Syracuse beats Louisville
If Wichita St beats Michigan
If Michigan beats Wichita St
If Wichita St beats Syracuse
If Syracuse beats Wichita St

Four Teams, Three Games

Saturday's and Sunday's games were so fun to watch, probably none more than Louisville versus Duke. As our bracket contest stood, 50 had Louisville advancing, 23 were in favor of Duke. This one game would help shape the results of nearly everyone's brackets. The game lived up to the hype, or at least the hype in my head. Though, the gruesome broken leg injury from Louisville's Kevin Ware, I couldn't have lived without seeing the replay of that. It reminded me of the Joe Theismann leg injury from the 1980's. (Thankfully CBS only played it twice and that was it) Best wishes and a health recovery goes out to Kevin.

The game was very close from the start, Duke and Louisville each were playing to their strengths. Then the nine minute injury timeout occurred and you're not sure how either team will respond, as it had an effect on many players. I will say, thankfully halftime was close so each team was able to regroup their thoughts and get their heads back in the game. During the second half, both teams came out strong, Duke was down, but went on a bit of a surge to tie the game at 42-42. I'm unsure if the coach called a timeout or if it was a TV timeout, but on the other side of that break, Louisville took the remainder of the game over and easily won. Nothing was falling for Duke and they lost by 23 points.

The other three games, the only other one that was sort of close was Wichita State versus Ohio State. Even then, Wichita State controlled the game with Ohio State coming on strong at the end to make it a game, but still fall short. In our bracket contest, no one correctly picked the outcome of this game.

Michigan won by 20 points over Florida, with 7 pick sheets selecting this one. While 2 pick sheets correctly picked Syracuse to defeat Marquette.

We'll pick this back up this coming Saturday with the championship game to play Monday evening.

Our current leader, is first time player, Melissa Cuddihy. Followed by Chris Belcher, and Stevo #4 (Mason).