Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Champs, or Chumps?

In the 26 years this contest has been run, our contestants' consensus national champion has won six (6) times. That's a success rate of 23%. But our question is, if our entrants have two top teams, because of a tie, does that double our chances? If so, that would bring us within four percent of flipping a coin! Yowsa.

Well, we'll discover the answer to that question this year, as both Kansas and Michigan State polled 19 votes each. Naturally, Butscher went for one of the two most popular choices, in this case Michigan State, presumably dooming the Spartans to an early upset. The Kansas Jayhawks will probably feel pretty good about that, until someone reminds them that they're still the co-favorite of our entrants.

Nine of us chose Virginia as national champion (George B, Booth, L Leach, Nocilla, Rybaltowski, Sciarabba, R Simon, Warner, J Whiteside), while eight intrepid souls went for local favorite Villanova (J Broder, Crotty, S Leach, J McAtee, M Peloso, K Ripley, L Schlegel, Selig). North Carolina was the darlings of five contestants (Anania, T Cristinzio, J Donadio, Jr., T Joseph, Packman). Oklahoma was OK for four (J Donadio, Sr., M Kleiman, Mad Leach, Mahalko). Two entrants are crossing their appendages for Xavier (Gorenstein and Rubinson).

As you might have noticed, our top seven champion choices were all #1 or #2 seeds. Only one non-top-two seed got a vote for champion, and that would be Maryland, chosen by co-commissioner M Josephs. Fair warning, the last time M Josephs was the sole person favoring a champion was 1998, when he rode Kentucky all the way to the winnings. Can lightning strike twice? Hey, you never know.

We can't remember the last time in our contest that a #1-seed failed to win a single vote for national champ, but that's just what happened to #1-seed Oregon this season. Those sounds you're hearing are the mad cheers of Ducks' fans everywhere, because they know their chances just got better.

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