The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Yet another year without a perfect men’s bracket
It will be another year without a perfect NCAA Tournament bracket.
Upsets by Yale, Oakland and Duquesne busted many of the more than 22 million brackets entered in the largest contest, ESPN’s Tournament Challenge, and the last three fell on Friday night when James Madison beat Wisconsin 72-61.
With only 1,825 surviving the first day of action, the number was down to single digits after Friday’s early games. Florida Atlantic’s loss to Northwestern knocked out about half of the survivors Thursday, with the eighthseeded Wildcats picked in about 45% of brackets.
It was down to 306 perfect brackets on the ESPN site before No. 10 seed Colorado beat seventh-seeded Florida, leaving 62. Yale’s victory over Auburn left just 10. And with just four games remaining on Friday night there were only three perfect brackets remaining on the ESPN site — and none in CBS’ contest or the one on March Madness Live, the NCAA’s official site.
The quest for a winless bracket also ended Friday.
The odds of picking a perfect bracket at random — not even counting the play-in games — is 1 chance out of 2 to the 63rd power, which is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or about 1 in 9.2 quintillion (give or take 20 quadrillion or so). According to University of Hawaii researchers, that is more brackets than the number of grains of sand on Earth.
A record 22 million brackets were filled out on ESPN’s site, up 15% over last year, with some of the early results knocking out millions.
CBS said its last perfect bracket was spoiled when Yale won on Friday afternoon.
Pearl questions officials over ejection in loss to Yale
Auburn’s Chad Baker-Mazara was ejected for a flagrant 2 foul less than four minutes into the fourth-seeded Tigers’ first-round NCAA Tournament loss to No. 13 seed Yale on Friday.
Auburn was clearly depleted without Baker-Mazara, especially in the second half as Yale rallied to win 78-76, and Tigers coach Bruce Pearl questioned why officials decided the foul merited an ejection.
“That’s a pretty tough call. He had got hit about five seconds earlier, got tangled up, got a little bit of an elbow, they let it go, maybe nobody saw it, and about five seconds later Chad hit him,” Pearl said. “It was inappropriate. Clearly a flagrant 1. The fact that it was elevated to a flagrant 2 was a decision that the official had to make, but it obviously had tremendous impact on outcome.
“Chad is one of our best players, he’s one of our very best playmakers, and was a huge part of our game plan, so to lose him in that situation was really, really disruptive to our team on both ends of the floor.”
The foul occurred less than three minutes into the game and led to a lengthy review by officials that eventually led to Baker-Mazara being sent to the locker room. Replays showed that Baker-Mazara appeared to throw an elbow toward Yale’s August Mahoney as the pair ran downcourt. Mahoney immediately tried to get the attention of officials and once play stopped with 16:59 left, officials went to the replay monitor.
Was loss May’s finale at Florida Atlantic?
If this was Dusty May’s finale at Florida Atlantic, he was nothing but grateful.
After coaching FAU to an unexpected Final Four appearance last year, May and his eighth-seeded Owls were knocked out in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Friday with a 77-65 overtime loss to No. 9 seed Northwestern.
Naturally, there’s speculation May could now leave for a bigger job after putting Florida Atlantic on the college basketball map.
“We’re really proud of the program that he’s built and the team, proud of the success they’ve been able to accomplish,” FAU athletic director Brian White said.
White said he plans to meet with May soon, as he normally would, to assess the season and what’s next.
May, who agreed to a 10-year contract extension last April, might be the hottest name on the coaching market. A former student manager for Bob Knight at Indiana, the 47-year-old May has been most frequently linked to Louisville, which fired Kenny Payne last week — a long-expected move at a blue-blood program that won only 12 games the past two seasons. He is also expected to draw interest from Michigan and Vanderbilt.