| Alrighty, here's the final standings:
### Name ................... Pts
---------------------------------
1 . onenybrother .......... 1270
2 . Texas Tech always loses 1240
3 . matt_99 ............... 1170
4t. Kickerbg31 ............ 1160
4t. irishdodger ........... 1160
6t. stonebreakerwasgod .... 1150
6t. GoshenGipper .......... 1150
8 . RichardRiot ........... 1130
9 . Clausen2Kamara ........ 1080
10. AZIRISHFAN ............ 1070
11. Stark 1 ............... 1050
12. brennan 1 ............. 1040
13. Pham 1 ................ 1010
14. NDFan78 ............... 1000
15. Armano 1 .............. .980
16. Magoteaux 1 ........... .970
17. IrishRamMan10 ......... .950
18. leprechaun4life ....... .930
19. ojo_223 ............... .920
20. Jones 1 ............... .830
21. Jensen 1 .............. .810
22t goirish#1 ............. .770
22t Uncle 1 ............... .770
24t Klang 1 ............... .750
24t Mingea III 1 .......... .750
26. Steveo2 ............... .700
27. Newcomb 1 ............. .690
28t jones 1 ............... .680
28t Akron Irish ........... .680
30. willey 1 .............. .640
31. phillips 2 ............ .570
Congrats to onenybrother! He edged me out by 30 points to take first place, and a closer look at the scoreboard shows that his entire 30-point advantage came from the opening round. For the rest of the tournament, we paced each other exactly and scored the exact same number of points each round. But in the opening round, he was smarter, and that made all the difference. Looking at onenybrother's bracket, he had only two major upsets selected: #11 Winthrop over #6 Notre Dame (which happened), and #12 Old Dominion over #5 Butler (which didn't happen). Both were fairly safe picks given the amount of buzz surrounding Winthrop and Old Dominion as potential Cinderellas, and there's almost always one 12 that beats a 5 and one 11 that beats a 6. For the rest of the first round, he showed restraint, picking the favorite in everything except for the 8-9 and 7-10 matchups, where he made a few safe upset picks. In contrast, I had 3 opening upsets: #12 Illinois, #12 Arkansas and #11 George Washington, with Arkansas going to the Sweet 16. None of them happened, and what's worse none of them had any real buzz around them at all. Not smart picks on my part. Those 3 teams alone cost me 50 points... and the win.
The lesson here? Play it safe. Opening round upsets happen, but it's so hard to predict them, and chasing after them can actually hit you two ways: you lose out on the upsets that don't happen, and you also lose out on the other upsets that DO happen. onenybrother played it safe and played it smart, and it paid off. Again, congrats!
And now, from the Way Too Much Free Time Department... here's some default comparison brackets to measure yourself against. The straight winner ended up being the Straight Seeding method, in more ways than one. By completely ignoring any potential upsets, someone could've won this pool outright by scoring 1330 points, head-and-shoulders above the poll, RPI and Sagarin methods and more than onenybrother's 1270 points. That makes sense, actually. The Selection Committee has a LOT of info at their fingertips and a LOT of knowledge and experience working for them when they seed the teams. On top of that, the Committee seems to "get" the mid-majors more than they used to. In years past, a team like Butler coming off of a strong year in a weak conference would've gotten stuffed into a 12-seed somewhere and forgotten about... until they knocked off a couple of big teams and made the Sweet 16 or Elite 8. But now more than ever, mid-majors like Butler and Southern Illinois are being evaluated much more accurately, and are getting the higher seeds that they deserve. Sure, the Committee "missed" on 11-seeds Winthrop and Virginia Commonwealth, but were they under-seeded, or were 6-seeds Duke and Notre Dame perhaps over-seeded this year instead? Both Winthrop and VCU got bounced out by 3-seeds in the second round, so it's hard to make the case that they deserved a seed much higher than 11 anyway. Bottom-line, the Committee knows what they're doing when they seed these teams, and it's not easy to out-guess them. A straight-seeding bracket would've finished ahead of literally 95% of the brackets out there. But it's not impossible... the national winner scored 1610 out of 1680 possible points.
Rank . Name ................... Pts
------------------------------------
1 .... Straight seeding ...... 1330
2 .... USA Today & AP polls .. 1060
3 .... Sagarin's power ranking 1050
4 .... RPI ................... 1000
And that's it. I'm going back to bed. |