As we close out the first two rounds of March Madness and prepare for next week’s Sweet Sixteen, just one double digit seed, Arkansas, remains in contention. Other than a couple of 6 seeds and a 5 seed, the remaining teams are all 1 through 4 seeds. Dare we say……..boring??????
After the plethora of upsets and surprises that we experienced during the previous two years, we expected a little more…..errr, you know……madness. Shoot, if you had simply picked the higher seeded team to win each matchup, you’d be among those in the lead right now. Hopefully we’ll see some shakeups over the next two rounds to lend a little fun to our little tournament here.
As for current performances, three entries got though Round 2 having picked 14 of the 16 games correctly, one of those being yesterday’s leader, Mark McKeown Bracket, which leads in both the Current Points sort and the Possible Points sort. Four entries got 13 of the 16 games right, and then there’s everybody else.
And also with the conclusion of the first two rounds we see the emergence of the dreaded asterisk. For those unfamiliar with the dreaded asterisk, let us put it this way – your payment is pretty much overdue. Yes, those unfortunate souls who see an asterisk next to their entry have no hope of finishing in the money. Chief among those is current last place entry, Pope’s Picks, winner of last year’s Brandy Award and seemingly a pretty good bet to wrap up another free entry as seven of the bracket’s Elite Eight picks have been eliminated. We have a few other contenders, namely a number of picks that went sideways with just six correct picks in Round 2, but it’s going to be a challenge to move the Pontiff off of the perch.