Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Bracket Battle Update


Well, the first weekend of the NCAA Basketball Tournament has come and gone… and some of our brackets are looking pretty bad at this point. Poor Frank isn’t doing too well. In fact, he’s dead last. I’ve held on to the top spot so far, but Hip is hanging in there. Uncle Kerouac on the other hand… well, he’s not doing much better than Frank (at least Uncle K can blame the catnip). Uncle Kerouac has lost three of his final four picks, so odds favor Frank might manage third place before it’s all said and done. That depends on North Carolina.



For those wondering how the score in our bracket battle is tallied, I’ll try to explain. First round picks are worth five points. Second round, ten points. Third round, fifteen points. Fourth round, twenty-five points. The semifinals are worth fifty points, and a correct pick on the championship game is one hundred. If you got every game right, you’d end up with 740 points.

Each of us started with that idyllic 740 points, but each wrong pick deducts points. In the first round, I managed to squeak by with only two wrong picks. That cost me ten points. But that didn’t make my score 730. No, my score at that point was 720. Why? Because, I’d also chosen one of my first round picks to win a second round game. That means I’d already lost another ten points, so after the first round I’d lost a total of twenty points. If that doesn’t make sense… well, then just take my word for it.

If you want to see what our brackets are looking like, then I’ve got them posted below. You can click on each for a larger view. Even in those smaller versions, you can already see quite a lot of red “X’s” in there.

The sad news is that after the second round of the tournament, we’ve lost all of the teams that had “wildcats” for their mascots. Kentucky was the last to go. All the others bit the dust in the first round.

Frank                                                        Hip


Uncle Kerouac                                           Wildcat

No comments: