2011 March Madness, Sweet Sixteen map
I wonder if there are any current examples of March Madness predictions all being correct up to the Sweet Sixteen right now – in other words, a still-perfect bracket. I saw where it was said there were 9.2 quintillion possibilities for possible winners in a 64-team bracket {see this}. Last year, on ESPN radio it was mentioned that after just the first 16 games (in the round of 64) were played, there were only 56 still-perfect brackets out of 4.8 million on-line brackets filled out – and that was after just 16 out of 16 games correctly picked. By this time in the tournament – the start of the Sweet Sixteen round – it’s 56 games you have to pick correctly, and it goes up to 60 games before the Regional Finals round (when there are 8 teams left). After that, there’s 7 more games. The total number of games in the tournament, counting the 2 Play-in games, is 65 games (for the 68-team field). The odds for a perfect bracket is one in 147,573,952,589,676,412,928 {see this, ‘”Perfectly Improbable: A flawless NCAA bracket“, by James A. Russell at the Kansas City Star}.
There are no documented cases of anyone ever filling out a perfect bracket.
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There are three states with 2 teams still alive…North Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The 2 teams from North Carolina are – the Duke Blue Devils and the North Carolina Tar Heels. The 2 teams from Virginia, both from the city of Richmond, are – the Richmond Spiders and the VCU Rams. The 2 teams from Wisconsin are – the Marquette Golden Eagles and the Wisconsin Badgers. The biggest upset was probably the #8th-seeded Butler Bulldogs (from Indianapolis, Indiana) over #1-seeded Pitt. But those two 11th-seed teams, Marquette and VCU also had big upsets over Syracuse and Purdue, respectively. This is VCU’s first appearance in the Sweet Sixteen.
Upsets in the 3rd Round (round of 32 teams) -
#11-seed Marquette Golden Eagles over #3-seed Syracuse, by 4 points.
#11-seed VCU Rams over #3-seed Purdue, by 18 points (!).
#10-seed Florida State Seminoles over #2-seed Notre Dame by 14 points (!).
#8-seed Butler Bulldogs over #1-seed Pitt, by 1 point.
#5-seed Arizona Wildcats over #4-seed Texas, by 1 point.
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Thanks to the contributors to the pages at en.wikipedia.org, ‘NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship‘.Attendances from NCAA.org, here
