Year in and year out we all fill out our brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament. Every year we look at our brackets after the first weekend of games, and most of us just rip them up in disgust knowing that we have no shot at winning our pool.
With USF out of the tournament this year, students don’t have the opportunity to make biased picks. This may give an advantage to students who are competing against fans of other schools, as bias is one of the main causes of a busted bracket.
This was the wrong year to be a No. 5 seed, as three of the four No. 12 seeds came out victorious in the round of 64. Gonzaga, a No. 1 seed in the West region, narrowly avoided an upset by No. 16 seed Southern. A No. 1 seed has never lost to a No. 16 seed in the history of the NCAA tournament.
Gonzaga went onto lose in the third round to Wichita State.
The biggest upset that happened on day one was No. 3 seed New Mexico falling to No. 14 Harvard. Approximately 8.15 million brackets were submitted to ESPN.com for the tournament, and after the first day of the tourney that included 16 games, there were only 1,238 perfect brackets left. A miniscule 0.015 percent of brackets were perfect after just 16 games were played.
Other upsets from the round of 64 include No. 13 seed La Salle upset No. 4 seed Kansas State, winning by a narrow margin of two points. One of the bigger upsets of the round of 64 came on day two, when No. 2 seed Georgetown was beaten by No. 15 seed Florida Gulf Coast, stunning many and busting brackets across the country.
At the conclusion of that game —the second day of the tournament — ESPN had zero perfect brackets.
The person with the last perfect bracket had Georgetown going to the Final Four like many others did. Many upsets went down in the first weekend of this year’s tournament.
Did you call them? Or are you ripping up your bracket as you read this?
Nathan Powell is a student at USF St. Petersburg majoring in Mass Communications. He can be reached at nathanpowell@mail.usf.edu.
