Day Two
The opening round is over and big congrats to Mr. Twiggs, who stands atop the leader board and takes home the $100 bonus for best score after Round 1 (reminder: Bijan Robinson is a celeb bracket and doesn't count)! Her bracket was buoyed by correctly picking Yale and James Madison yesterday, in addition to NC State and Oregon. Nice work!
We have a new candidate for biggest loser this morning as well! One of Doug Barth's many brackets is tied with Pur doo doo for the Most Futile award. Thank you both for your contributions to the pot, the race to the bottom is officially ON! Current top 10 is below, with the full standings here.
James Madison and Grand Canyon both had big, underdog wins yesterday, but a lot of you clearly saw that coming, with 134 and 115 of you picking those games correctly. Yale over Auburn, on the other hand, caught most of us sleeping, with only 40 people getting that correct. Here are the final chaotic seconds for those that missed it
Which made it a turrible day for Auburn Alum Charles Barkley
Remember Loyola's biggest fan, Sister Jean? She's in our field this year, and is squarely in the middle of the pack at 147th, beating out both Jimmy Fallon (202nd) and President Biden (239th). Snoop Dogg is smoking most of the celeb competition, coming in at a very respectable 59th place. So, if you're struggling with your picks, consider getting high AF before filling out your brackets, I guess...
Among the "just for fun" brackets, because everything is political these days, I did one bracket favoring blue states and another favoring red states to see how they would fare. As of now, the BLUE STATES bracket is doing much better, sitting in 14th place, with the RED STATE bracket 3rd from last at 298th, largely because it missed almost every game in the East. Will either prove to be an effective strategy long term? I honestly doubt it, but I guess we'll see.
And in closing for the morning, it's always fun to see how we fare against the ultimate measure of futility, the COIN FLIP bracket. And the answer is, umm, not well. It's currently in 105th place -- not exactly crushing it, but still better than more than 2/3 of you. Sure makes all of that time you spent researching feel worthwhile, right? RIGHT???
Anyway, that's it for today! Enjoy the games today!