Welcome KlicKNettars, to our March Madness Party, brought to you by KlicKNet and the Wkly Hit List. This is going to be a very different post, some things are the same, but we're kicking it up a notch, NCAA style. Over the past four days, we've witness 36 games, some were blowouts, some showed the higher seeded teams' dominance over the lower seeded teams, some games were closed, and some were massive upsets. It amazing how we decided to throw this party right when March Madness rolled around, because we have seen, if not, seven major upsets in this Men's Division I Basketball Tournament. Take a guess at which one made #1 on our first-time-ever Top-7 GameTime Round-Up, the name sounds familiar doesn't it?
Our Inside Scoop for this March Madness Party is about Brackets, and listen this isn't going to be some boring Last Week Tonight lecture, but I'll try to make it fun won't I? According to Wikipedia, a bracket is a tree diagram that represents the series of games played during a knockout tournament. Many or all of the major sports leagues in North America use a bracket to determine who wins the World Championship, you see it the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, and pretty soon in the XFL for the third time in its life. The College Football Playoff will start using a 12-team bracket, allowing more teams the opportunity of winning the National Football Championship.
During March Madness, there's a 68-team bracket including the First Four Play-In games, then we get we to the Round of 64, the Round of 32, the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, and finally National Basketball Championship. Every year, millions of casual and serious fans "fill out brackets"—predict the winners of each game in the tournament—in both formal contests, sponsored by various corporations, and informal betting pools among friends or colleagues. My family and I don't do these things because it's a waste of time and it's not spending any money, I simply fill out the bracket writing down whose in the First Four and Round of 64 during Selection Sunday, and then I write who advances as the tournament goes on until the end.
Another interesting fact is that sports analysis most often pick the higher seeded teams to beat the lower seeded teams in the Round of 64. But the lower seeded will try and prove the critics and predictors wrong by trying to make an upset victory can ruin the bracket someone's betting on. During the Division I Basketball Tournaments in both Men's and Women's, there's a term that goes around called the "Perfect Bracket," when someone can correct who wins which game and who moves on to win the championship, but having the perfect is not all what it's cracked up to be these years. Some will remember that in 2018, the UMBC Retrievers men's basketball team became the first No. 16 Seed in NCAA Tournament history to defeat a No. 1 Seed in the first round, they would beat Virginia 74–54. Fast forward to last night, No. 16 Fairleigh Dickinson defeated No. 1 Purdue 63-58, making them the second No. 16 team to upset #1. You won't believe the memes that having lighting up on social media when that happened, and I wish I could show some of them to those readers, but we have to move on some even more interesting facts.
In an article on NCAA.com, the longest, verifiable, streak of correct picks in a bracket to start the beloved March Madness tournament use to be 49, a streak that was established back in 2019, how ironic is that? It was after UMBC did the unthinkable the year before. Get this, a man from Ohio correctly predicted the entire 2019 NCAA tournament into the Sweet 16, something that even the NCAA gave even admitted that they "have not seen in years of when tracking publicly verifiable online March Madness brackets at all major games." The last verifiably perfect men’s NCAA bracket busted last night when No. 16 FDU stunned No. 1 Purdue, before the tournament officially started there were well over millions of perfect brackets, the percentage number was incredibly high, but then it shrunk downtown 23% perfect last Thursday night when No. 16 Princeton won an upset over No. Arizona and when No. 14 Furman upsetted No. 3 Virginia.
There are no more perfect brackets left, which means there's going to be a new streak beginning next year in 2024, that is if another No. 16 team decided to play spoiler, on the other hand, it just goes to show fun it to watch March Madness. We see teams make moments through the tournament and make history for their school that will last for a lifetime. Regardless of what the bracket, it's going to be real interesting to see who wins the National Championship in April and make their school freakin' famous.
Now that I've told you KlicKNettars how brackets work, you probably wanna see exactly "How every last perfect March Madness bracket busted in the 2023 NCAA men's tournament." Well here's A Little Help from Michella Chester from NCAA Digital.
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