March Madness Overview:
The NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball teams compete in an annual tournament every March to crown the ultimate Division 1 champion. After 68 college teams are chosen to participate in the tournament, communities gather together to create brackets that try to predict the winners, resulting in lots of madness on and off the courts.
Every year, the GA community takes part in the madness by giving students the opportunity to create their own bracket and compete against each other to crown the ultimate champion. However, making your own bracket comes with many questions given that one must consider a plethora of factors. The NCAA basketball tournament is known for its unforeseeable upsets, and predicting just a few wrong games can spoil your perfect bracket, ruining one’s hopes and dreams of winning.
The men’s bracket has a reputation for being unpredictable, whereas the women’s bracket tends to stay consistent with the initial seeding. For example, the men’s bracket frequently features the 12th seed beating a 5th seed and exhilarating games between 8th and 9th seeds. This year, UNC had a tough start to their regular season, but as they gained momentum leading up to the March Madness tournament, they finished in the Championship Final as a No. 8 seed. Their underdog status stimulated a lot of extreme emotions from the championship game because many people weren’t expecting them to make it that far, given their rocky start. Unfortunately, UNC’s streak ended when they were defeated by Kansas.
Although the women’s brackets tend to be more predictable, there were results that no one could predict, such as No. 10 Creighton defeating No. 7 Colorado and eventually making it all the way to the Elite Eight. There they lost against soon-to-be champions, South Carolina, leading to a predictable Final Four of No. 1 seeds Louisville, Stanford, South Carolina and 2nd seeded UConn, all historically strong tournament teams.
Women’s Bracket:
Madison Kerest ‘24 won the women’s bracket by accurately predicting South Carolina to win the Women’s Basketball NCAA D1 championship. Madison said that South Carolina had a really strong and well-coached team, and that she partially has a bias towards the team since her older sister goes to school there.
Watching the women’s tournament, Madison’s favorite underdog was Creighton, who “had a good run before they were matched up against South Carolina in the elite eight.” After a hard championship game between UConn and South Carolina, South Carolina was crowned the 2022 NCAA women’s basketball champion, and Madison was crowned #1 in GA’s women’s bracket challenge.
Men’s Bracket:
Like Madison, Stephen Trancana ‘24 was able to clinch 1st place in GA’s men’s bracket by correctly predicting Kansas to win the Men’s Basketball NCAA championship. Stephen said he chose Kansas because of “all their past successes.”
Stephen mentioned that there wasn’t a specific strategy he used when making his bracket, saying “whichever one I clicked seemed to work out.” He didn’t choose a lot of teams for a specific reason. He stated, “the honest answer is that I watched three full college basketball games all season, so when I was filling it out it was completely random. Whichever one I was feeling I went with.” Stephen did say, however, that for the most part, he stayed true to the seeding, and that “out of all the one seeds, I had three of them making it really far”
Another thing about Stephen’s bracket was that he had No. 8 UNC going pretty far in the bracket, which was unexpected by many. When asked if there was a reason he had UNC going so far, Stephen replied, “It’s funny because I’m a Duke fan. But Armando Bacot, I watched him from the first game that they played, and I knew I had to choose them. I was rooting for Duke when they played UNC, but I actually had UNC winning that game.”
Arguably the most difficult part of creating a perfect bracket is being able to correctly predict upsets. Another Cinderella story of this tournament was when St. Peters, a No. 15 team who defeated No. 2 Kentucky in the first round, making it all the way to the Sweet Sixteen. When asked what he thought about this unexpected team from New Jersey, Stephen said, “St. Peter’s had a good run, I mean, Mr. Doug clutched up for them so it was nice to see that. I was kind of hoping they would win. I would have been okay losing my bracket if they won.”