With the Final Four set, the 15th annual Living Room Times men’s NCAA Pool is down to a two-person race: either Matt Wiser or Sharon Greggs will win the championship.
As the what-if scenarios show, Greggs will prevail if West Virginia either wins the national title or loses to Butler in the title game. Wiser will prevail in all other scenarios.
Meanwhile, in the 13th annual LRT women’s NCAA pool, it’s a three-person race between Lauren Taylor, Alison Flipse Vargas, and my two-year-old daughter, “Loyette.” And it’s quite likely to be decided in the Elite Eight. In fact, if Stanford and Baylor both win on Monday, Lauren Taylor will clinch the pool championship. If either Xavier or Duke win, then the pool will likely be decided on Tuesday, barring a Florida State victory over UConn that would be perhaps the greatest upset of all-time.
First things first: although she’s mathematically alive, Loyette’s chances are realistically quite slim, and are predicated entirely on the unusualness of her picks: she’s presently tied for 49th place out of 65, but has tremendous potential to gain points if her highly unlikely national championship game pairing of two #3 seeds, Florida State and Xavier, actually happens. However, Loyette will be mathematically eliminated if either the Musketeers (who play #1-seed Stanford tomorrow) or the Seminoles (who play #1-seed, 75-game-winning-streak-riding UConn on Thursday) lose. And, as I just mentioned, a Florida State win over UConn would quite possibly be the biggest upset in the history of women’s college basketball.
Assuming the Loyette Miracle doesn’t take place, the pool comes down to two Elite Eight games: Duke-Baylor tomorrow, and Oklahoma-Kentucky on Tuesday. If either Baylor or Kentucky prevails, Lauren Taylor wins the pool. But if both Duke and Oklahoma both win — and they’ll both be favored — then Alison Flipse Vargas wins the pool. Either way, the pool will be decided by Tuesday at the latest.
Meanwhile, back on the men’s side, another way of explaining the scenarios is this: if Duke beats West Virginia in the Final Four on Saturday, Wiser will clinch the pool, regardless of the Butler-Michigan State result. If, on the other hand, Butler and West Virginia win their respective semifinals, Greggs will clinch. If Michigan State and West Virginia win, the pool will go down to the wire (with Wiser needing an MSU title and Greggs needing a WVU title).
Among the more intriguing scenarios, as pointed out by Matt’s brother Mike Wiser: “A Duke win in the final will mean that my brother and I will finish 1-2, despite us both being ignorant about college basketball.”
At present, Matt Wiser leads with 294 out of a possible 412 points. Greggs is next with 287 points, followed by Ryan Dalidowitz (283), Jessica Cowans (280), Julia Hauser (275) and Casey Zak (272). Dalidowitz, Cowans and Zak are three of just five contestants who correctly picked Butler to reach the Final Four, but their best possible finishes are 2nd, 3rd and 7th, respectively.
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When I watched the Iowa State-UConn game Sunday, one of the people in the house I was watching it at had her men’s bracket out. She had UNI, Michigan State, Ohio State, and Tennessee as the four from the Midwest in the Sweet 16. She also had Butler, West Virginia, and Duke in the Final Four, with Butler beating Duke in the final.
A couple other regions were fried early, but I had to marvel at those picks.
Wow. That’s very impressive. I don’t think my ego would ever deflate if I made those picks. I’m still bragging about the time I went 29-for-32 in the 2005 first round, successfully picking all three major upsets (#12 Wisconsin-Milwaukee, #13 Vermont and #14 Bucknell). But that bracket imploded in the first game of the second round, when Gonzaga lost. To get Butler AND Northern Iowa right is awfully impressive in its own right; to also predict runs by Michigan State and Tennessee… wow.