Let the Madness Begin: Students fill out brackets
Posted by The Skyliner on March 25th, 2009Rachel Ham
Staff Writer
It’s that time of year again: March Madness has begun. Basketball fans everywhere waited anxiously to see when, where and who their favorite team would play against.
Now that the tournament matchups have been selected, even non-basketball fans are filling out their brackets and making up competitions of their own.
With ESPN cameras rolling, President Obama himself even took time to fill out a bracket. Obama had plenty of opinions about the various teams in the tournament. He picked North Carolina and Louisville to meet in the final game and North Carolina to win it all.
ESPN’s Andy Katz commented on Obama’s upset pick of Utah over Arizona. But Obama assured Katz that it had nothing to do with the fact that Obama’s former presidential opponent John McCain resides in Arizona.
“I think Arizona is a great state. I love playing golf there. But they just squeaked in,” Obama said in explanation of his choice.
North Greenville students have been busy making their own selections.
Many have joined the 2009 Bracket Challenge hosted by facebook.com. By adding this application to your facebook profile, you can play in a public pool or invite your friends and make a pool of your own.
Other students have joined contests put together by their Bible study groups.
Most of the sports analysts are picking North Carolina to win the national championship on April 6 in Detroit. Louisville and Pittsburgh are other favorites in the tournament.
Even if you do not have a favorite team to pull for and you are basing your picks on a team’s colors, you may find you get more right than the biggest basketball fan you know.
Even if you are not a fan of the sport, it can be fun to see how many picks you can get right. If you are lucky, you may even accurately guess which “Cinderella” team will provide a huge upset.
Bracketology, the name for the process of predicting game winners in the NCAA tournament, is far from an exact science.
If you have not filled out a bracket yet, you can easily print off a bracket from ESPN.com. Even though the games have already started, you can still make the second round picks.
There is much fun and frustration to be had when filling out a bracket.
So take a few minutes from your week, get a few friends together and start up your own competition to see who can correctly pick the most winners.