One weekend and a half in and your NCAA tourney bracket is shattered beyond belief. Why? Where did you go wrong? You calculated the assist/turnover ratio in neutral-site games played in December, but before Christmas. You searched the power rankings put out by ESPN, NPR, and The Food Network. This was supposed to be your year.
Alas, you made just a few critical errors. Your friends at FishDuck.com asked some of our readers to send in broken brackets for analysis purposes.
We were able to resurrect the crumpled ones.
The shredded ones gave us more trouble.
But, we were quickly able to see a few obvious problems.
Mistaking “seeding” for “rating:” A few brackets, sadly from Corvallis, (Have you noticed how often we say that? Poor dears. Bless their hearts.) reversed the seeding, believing they were rating models. This became problematic when they predicted UC-Davis would defeat Kansas. Remember this for next year: When analyzing college basketball teams …
This is a one-seed.
This is a three-seed.
This was UC-Davis.
FishDuck.com also noticed some confusion in the identity of the teams involved. For example: Several people from Philomath made an egregious error where URI was concerned. URI is the University of Rhode Island.
It is not UTI as you see above …
Freshman basketball fan at UW.
3. Lonzo Ball is not short for Lorenzo, and he is no relation to former UW coach Lorenzo Romar. If you mistook the two, I can see how you would have been tempted to eliminate UCLA in the 1st round and pre-preemptively eliminate them for the next five years.
It’s an anti-littering campaign in the most-up-its-own-rear-end State in the Union.
4. “Don’t Mess With Texas?” You thought Texas Southern might be worth a look because of “Don’t Mess With Texas.” It is an impressive thing to say, isn’t it? Is it a cry for liberty, like “Remember the Alamo?” Is it a warrior howl of freedom?
Jeeves was a search engine butler.
5. Not picking Butler versus Winthrop because you thought it was a one-on-one celebrity exhibition. There is no excuse for this.
And Winthrop is a school.
Winthorpe was Dan Aykroyd in “Trading Places.”
Kim Hastings
Tacoma, Washington
Top photo by ncaa.com
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Kim Hastings is a 1984 graduate of Northwest Christian College. He cut his journalistic teeth as sports editor of a paper in his home town of Fortuna, CA, and, later as a columnist for the Longview Daily News in Longview, WA.
He saw his first Oregon game in 1977 and never missed a home game from 1981 until a bout with pneumonia cut his streak short in 1997. He was one of the proud 3200 on a bitterly cold night in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1989 for the Independence Bowl, and continues to be big supporter of Oregon sports. He is an active participant on the various Oregon Ducks messageboards as “TacomaDuck.”
