Damn, Butler!

Congrats to Butler, Mike Hames, Josh Kennedy, Bryan Kaplan, Jay Farnam & Brigid McKeown for picking it. What a game.

End of Day 1

Scores are posted. Some good games today! Can't wait to get home tomorrow to park my @ss on the couch and watch ALL of them tomorrow!

Some interesting pick trends

• only 26 picked UCLA over Sparty. The big 10 fans were almost right!
• only 12 picked Morehead State (13 seed) over Louisville while...
• 69 picked Richmond (12 seed) over Vandy
• apparently there are a lot of Big 12 fans out there - only 37 picked Cincy over Mizzou.

As always, email if you have questions...

Stupid "first four"

The addition of the extra teams hosed a shitpile of equations in my scoring sheet - yeah, the one that actually gets published to the web. So, for right now, the rank and current score ARE correct, but everything else has a big wrench in it. I'll fix it tonight, probably - just thought you should be aware.

Finally...

Finally out of the conference room! Time to make a drink, catch up with the 21 brackets still to be entered and finally update the scoring for everyone. Not sure how long it'll take, but probably less than an hour.

If you want to know something immediately, shoot me an email.

And, we're off...

I can't stand Jim Nantz. He did, however get a call VERY right towards the end of regulation of the first game... as the game-tying 3 fell thru the net, he said "and March Madness is underway!"

I also can't stand that we have to go through the process of 4 play-in games (great blog-rant here), it is pretty sweet that we're treated to an overtime game in the first 16 vs 16 matchup between Ark-Little Rock and UNC-Asheville!

68 early entries. 46 picked UNC Asheville correctly. I'm not posting new scores until after tomorrow's games - you can check your own brackets.

If you haven't sent 'em in yet, make sure you get 'em in by tip-time on Thursday!

*edit* For what its worth, 41 people correclty picked Clemson.

Blind Picks

Ran across a cool thing while browsing this morning's sports headlines on www.quickish.com (check it out - its awesome). The Wall Street Journal has linked to a site that eliminates all ranks, records and team names, and has you pick based on an estimation of their RPI, NCAA seed, conference strength and four team strengths and weaknesses. I did a bracket of my own "MCK Blind Picks" for the pool this year. Interesting stuff.

Here's the site: http://graphicsweb.wsj.com/documents/BLINDFOLDBRACKETS1103/index.html

Here's how mine turned out:

Welcome Back!

Its that magical time of year again keep checking in here for commentary and any pool-related news.

If you haven't received a reply to your bracket submission yet, don't sweat it. I have about 30-40 brackets in my inbox from last night alone and won't get around to inputting them until later this afternoon after I arrive in lovely Burlington, IA. I was planning to do it here at work this morning until I sat down to find an email from Management explicitly instructing us NOT to do any pool-related activities on government property. While I love the pool, it's probably not worth losing a job over. I'll get them all in by tipoff tonight.

Happy Basketballing!


- Posted from Matt's iPhone.

Location:Volunteer Dr,Milwaukee,United States