March Madness, one of the most well known and viewed basketball tournaments in the world where the top ranked NCAA teams face off.
Part of the fun of March Madness is making brackets and trying to predict who will win the tournament. Granted, the odds of perfectly predicting every game is little to none.
This year had some fairly unexpected upsets throughout the tournament. For starters, this year’s final four does not feature seeds 1, 2, and 3. On top of that, earlier in the tournament, 16th seed Farleigh Dickerson defeated 1st seed Purdue 63-58.
This year’s final four unexpectedly features 9th seed Florida Atlantic University, 5th seed University of Miami, 5th seed San Diego State University, and 4th seed University of Connecticut.
According to an article by the NCAA, 6 people somehow, and miraculously, predicted this year’s final four.
Senior Porter Sherman, who made 2 brackets this year and has been following March Madness for the last 4 – 5 years, says that one of his brackets was research based and the other bracket was upset based.
According to an article by the NCAA, the odds of predicting a perfect bracket are “about 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808”.
Now that the final four is set, Sherman wants to see FAU vs UMiami in the championship game.
“UMiami, gotta support the Florida teams, and that is where I wanna attend grad school,” Sherman said.
Senior Alec Naft, who made 6 brackets this year, and has been following March Madness for 6 years now, wants FAU to win the national championship, now that the final four is set.
“I want FAU to go all the way. As someone who grew up in Florida and [was] born in south Florida, I’d love to see them win,” Naft said.
Honors Anatomy and Physiology teacher Anthony Palumbo, says that the moment that got him into March Madness and college basketball was when he watched the Christian Laettner shot against Kentucky live in 1992.
“It was after that moment, I was hooked,” Palumbo said.
Sherman and Naft, along with some of their fellow classmates, love to talk about sports with Palumbo, so they all are participating in a friendly competition for bragging rights.
“We like to talk about sports a lot [and] it’s the most popular sporting event going on at the moment, so we said let’s fill up a bracket and see who does the best,” Palumbo said.
Naft says that it’s fun to follow the games and talk about it with other people.
This year, the national championship will feature San Diego State University and University of Connecticut.
UConn won the national championship this year with a score of 76 to 59 for the 5th time in school history. UConn is undefeated in national championship games.
