If you’re going to buy some of the top talent in college basketball, the least it could do is perform. Now of course we don’t know if Sean Miller actually did pay DeAndre Ayton $100,000 to come to Arizona, but we do know that Ayton and the rest of his teammates were missing in action last night against Buffalo. Buffalo led most of the way and cruised in a 13-4 matchup, beating Arizona 89-68.
Who’da thunk it?
Mike Berardino, that’s who. Not only did he get that game right, but he also nailed the Loyola Chicago upset of Miami as part of a perfect 16-for-16 day. That is rare air, indeed. So Mike, a past champion who won the pool in 2007, already is the only one in the pool with a perfect bracket.
In case you were wondering, a story the NCAA did before the tournament started said 39 straight correct picks to open the tournament was the closest they could find to a perfect bracket (that could be well documented). And for those of you who didn’t see this New York Times story on the 98-year-old nun who is the Ramblers’ team chaplain, you should check it out. If you had known that Loyola had not only God but also a sweet old lady on its side, you might have picked that upset after all.
The Loyola game didn’t actually take a whole lot of people in our pool by surprise. A full 43 percent of the pool picked that one. But Buffalo was picked by just seven people. More notably, 15 people had Arizona going to the Final Four, and one person even picked Arizona to win it all.
So naturally, Mike is our leader after day one. There was an eight-way tie for second place, with those folks missing just two picks. Much too early to try to handicap anything. As long as you haven’t already lost a Final Four team, you probably don’t have too much to worry about.
Aside from Loyola and Buffalo, the rest of day one was pretty chalky, with higher seeds moving on with relative ease for the most part. UNC Greensboro had a great opportunity to beat Gonzaga but couldn’t quite close the deal. That was a sneaky upset pick for some of you. Rhode Island was on the ropes against Oklahoma but played better in overtime to win a 7-10 matchup. The 8-9 games were split, as you would expect.
We ended up with 105 official entries by my count. I need to audit everything to make sure all the entries are good and paid and all that, but we should be good. I also saw that current North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, and former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush did public brackets this year, so I entered those just for the heck of it. I suppose I could enter the brackets of some basketball experts too, but who really cares about them?