You're not alone: There are no perfect brackets left after the weekend's upsets
I hope you're not like me, because if you are, you had a hard time falling asleep last night and so you made the mistake of checking your bracket in the midst of all that tossing and turning. And if you're really like me, your bracket is a total nightmare, so that was a bad idea.
Turns out, we're not alone: There are no perfect brackets left for this year's NCAA men's basketball tournament after this weekend, and according to NCAA.com, only one bracket — out of the tens of millions filled out across NCAA.com, Bleacher Report, CBS, ESPN, Fox Sports, and Yahoo — even made it unscathed through most of Saturday. Just one prescient user on Yahoo picked the tournament's first 39 games correctly, including upsets by No. 12 Middle Tennessee State, No. 11 Xavier, No. 11 USC, and No. 11 Rhode Island. Despite correctly predicting No. 8 Wisconsin would upend No. 1 Villanova on Saturday afternoon, the user's streak ended later in the evening, on the tournament's 40th game, when No. 5 Iowa State fell to No. 4 Purdue. (Don't feel too bad, though: Not even the best bracketeer of the year predicted No. 2 Duke would be upset by No. 7 South Carolina on Sunday.)
The good news is that with several powerhouses going down over the weekend, brackets that bet heavily on one or the other emerged less ruined than expected. In ESPN's bracket game, 45.5 percent of brackets suffered when Villanova went down in the round of 32 rather than making it to the Final Four — but because 39.2 percent of users picked Duke to make it out of the region instead, the Blue Devils' loss late Sunday evened things out between most brackets. In ESPN's Tournament Challenge, only 4.8 percent of brackets chose South Carolina to advance to even the Sweet 16, and only 9.1 percent had Wisconsin doing the same.
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For the lucky few who picked No. 3 Baylor or No. 4 Florida to advance out of the East Region and make the Final Four — just 8.2 percent of ESPN's brackets — it might be time to send Wisconsin and South Carolina some flowers, because they just took you a big step further toward winning your office pool.
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Kimberly Alters is the news editor at TheWeek.com. She is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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