Brackets a perfect disaster

FDU win flushes picks down drain

The chase for the perfect March Madness bracket will have to wait another year.

In a men’s tournament that saw a 2 and a 4 seed lose on Day 1, only a relative handful of brackets were still intact in the biggest contests when 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson took the floor against Purdue. The Knights stunned the top-seeded Boilermakers Friday night, sending the remaining perfect brackets into trash cans everywhere.

On the CBS Sports site, 0.0003% of brackets were perfect through the eight early Friday games. A few hours later, the network tweeted that “March is for busted brackets” in describing the goose egg.

No perfection for ESPN’s Tournament Challenge bracket game, either. Only 22 brackets out of more than 20 million filled out were still perfect earlier Friday and they vanished as the games wrapped up.

Gophers hire WVU coach

Dawn Plitzuweit, who coached the West Virginia women’s team into the NCAA tournament in her only season in Morgantown, was hired Saturday by Minnesota to revive a lagging program.

Plitzuweit, whose Mountaineers team was eliminated Friday by Arizona, was given a six-year contract to replace Lindsay Whalen, who stepped down earlier this month.

Plitzuweit was a successful coach at South Dakota State before moving to West Virginia, and was an assistant at Michigan and Wisconsin.

Sasser set to go

Houston’s All-America guard Marcus Sasser was expected to play Saturday night when the No. 1 seed Cougars met Auburn in their second-round matchup.

Sasser went down with a groin injury last Saturday in an American Athletic Conference tournament semifinal, returned to the lineup Thursday for Houston’s ’s NCAA first-round game, only to leave the lineup when he reaggravated the groin.

Pitino’s future

After his third season as Iona’s coach ended Friday with a loss to Connecticut, 70-year-old coach Rick Pitino was asked if there would be fourth season with the Gaels.

“I really don’t have an answer for that,” said Pitino, who is rumored to be St. John’s main target for the coaching vacancy.