BvB 2013 Tournament Challenge Perfected Scoring Update

Well there were certainly some doldrums along the way during the best weekend in sports, but some great games and great memories to boot. We'll have more thoughts about the past and looking forward to this coming weekend shortly.

But now is the moment to check in about the sad state of affairs in BracketLand. Let's be clear first, there is plenty of sadness in Mudville about brackets. By the time Georgetown had finished receiving their beatdown on Friday afternoon, there was not a single perfect bracket left out of 8 million plus entries on ESPN's website. And I can't imagine too many people outside of some die-hard/crazy fans living in the Fort Myers area had everyone's favorite Dunk City darlings into the Sweet Sixteen.

Each year I make a Google Spreadsheet to reflect the Mega Awesome Blue vs Blue scoring paradigm. You can check it out HERE. I didn't bother looking ahead - but it's interesting to see that our top entries all have a different champ - so there are a lot of people still alive to win. The biggest climber due to our revised scoring was the aptly named Oracle entry of MrsMok. The upset bonus points provided a jump from 16th to a tie for 2nd.

Overall our ESPN group didn't fair so well - only 6 of 23 entries are above the 50th percentile.

Some oddities and observations:

• Everyone suffered equally from picking Georgetown (most into the Sweet Sixteen). This being there 4th year in a row loosing to a double digit seed, Bart and I decided we will have to rename the Most Likely to Underperform Award in our regional breakdowns to The GeorgetownNotreDameCincyPittMountainWest Award.
• Overall the West Bracket has a lot of red lines for a lot of people. There was (aptly as is turns out) not a lot of collective faith in Gonzaga. Not many people had them into the Final Four - and more than a handful had them bowing out in Round 2 - but all those handful had them loosing to Pitt. (I guess we forgot that Pitt is in the name of the Underperforming award...)
• There were 2-3 correct LaSalle upset picks, 2 picks for Harvard, 2 for Iowa St; Oregon, Minnesota, Ol Miss and Cal all had a smattering of better predictions. But overall there weren't a huge number of bonus points available this year.
  
• Our group was O-fer the big bonus points for Sweet Sixteen teams - no one had Oregon, FGCU, Witchita State or LaSalle. There were a couple of Arizona picks - but the bonus there was a modest 20 points.
• For those at the top of the spreadsheet here is a dose of humble pie: A perfect bracket thus far would have scored 1165 points in our system. Our current leader has 490.