The second half of day one brought us a few upsets along with a few scares for some of the higher seeded teams. The biggest upset of the day, as far as our brackets are concerned at least, was the win by the eleventh seeded VCU over the sixth seeded North Carolina, overcoming a 19 point deficit to take the win in an overtime thriller. To their credit 51 of our participants actually picked this correctly, but the loss by UNC was a bracket buster for a good number of entries, especially the two that had the Tarheels going all the way to the final game. More on those picks shortly.
So as we conclude the first day of tournament action we have a four way tie for first place (Current Points sort), each entry having picked 14 of 16 matchups correctly. Given the number of upsets that took place on day one this is some impressive picking. Behind these four we have 20 entries all tied for fifth place, each of which missed on only three games, which in itself is just about as impressive. Overall, though it is way too early to get too excited regardless of the standings, so don’t go planning on paying off the mortgage quite yet if you happen to be one of the leaders.
At the other end of the standings, even the laggards managed to make some reasonable picks, the worst performance being just seven correct results, this accomplished by two of our participants. Surprisingly, though, when sorting by possible points, rather than current points, those two picks zoom all the way up to a tie for 110th place. The UNC loss struck a massive blow to those two entries that had UNC in the final game, HillyGoodBracket and TRR2, but even worse than that is Patricio 22, who has already seen two Elite Eight picks fall by the wayside. Oddly enough the HillyGoodBracket entry is one of those tied for fifth place overall when sorted by Current Points, illustrating the fallacy of projecting results at this point. This underscores the fact that it is much too early to project any kind of a winner or loser at this point. There are still many contests to be lost and we’ll hope for more surprises in tomorrow’s games.