When the #11 seed Dayton managed to beat in state rival Ohio State by one point it sent shockwaves through all those folks that bothered to fill out the ‘Billion Dollar Bracket” and then, quite logically, picked the mighty Buckeyes to triumph over Flyers of Dayton. So, in one of the first games of the first day of March Madness, Ohio State is gone.
Dayton’s Vee Sanford banked in a nice layup with just under 4 seconds on the clock and pushed to Flyers to 60-59 victory over their ‘big brother Buckeyes’. This will be a game long remembered in the state of Ohio.
According to CBS.com, 81% of their users had picked the Buckeyes to win in the second round, but they didn’t and those folks are out of luck for the billion. Then the scholars at Harvard beat Cincinnati for yet another upset and a bunch more brackets were negated before the first big day of competition was done.
Oddsmakers in Nevada were up in arms when the brackets first came out claiming that the committee got it all wrong. Many said that this was the toughest brackets they had ever seen. There was also quite a bit of griping about the bracket that undefeated Wichita State found themselves in, only Kentucky, Duke and Louisville to contend with!
Even if you did pick Dayton to beat Ohio State which only about one-in-five did, would you have extended that unlikely event to predict that the Flyers would also upset the Orange of Syracuse? Not many did. Most brackets were ruined by the middle of the second round.
So, Warren Buffet’s billion dollars are safe and sound for now. Perhaps he will make the offer again next year and maybe, just maybe, someone might get it right. I personally am thinking about letting my 5 year old niece fill out my bracket. She doesn’t know anything about college basketball, but maybe that won’t matter.
The big upsets aside, the games played on Thursday and Friday were mostly one sided. On Saturday the action intensified considerably with some really close games and some really great basketball being played. It was obvious that those kids were playing their hearts out. But that’s what ‘March Madness’ is all about.
Several of the games on Saturday and Sunday could have gone either way and the conclusion came down to the final seconds of the contest. When the Shockers of Wichita State took on the legendary Kentucky Wildcats it turned out to be one of the best basketball games of the year with the outcome uncertain until the final buzzer. That’s why those brackets are so hard to hit!
