The Liberty Papers

Well, big things have happened this weekend. The opening round of the NCAA tournament brought far more excitement than last year’s, with some major-league upsets.

I’ve heard that some big vote occurred in Washington as well, but I’ll have to look into that later.

In our own bracket challenge, the first weekend has ‘sploded quite a few of your brackets — at least for anyone who chose Kansas to win it all (just under half the field picked them). The standings of the top 5:

1. 256 pts – Brad Warbiany
2. 249 pts – Nate McHugh
3. 230 pts – Brad Porter
4. 221 pts – Jim Johnson
5. 220 pts – Nic Stersic

Of those top 5, only Jim and I have someone other than Kansas taking the trophy [Kentucky for me, Syracuse for him].

There’s a lot of time for people to catch (and pass) me though, as half my bracket is already crushed — I chose Kansas into the final game and Pitt into the Final Four, so I’ve got a lot of concern…

But I don’t care, because Purdue has now upset* their first two opponents and will be ready to [actually] upset Duke on Friday night. It reminds me [and should remind Jim] of a day back in 2000, when a bunch of hung-over frat boys participated in the Boiler “Academic Super Bowl” and upset the field by taking second place against a bunch of the schools professional societies in a trivia challenge.

Good luck to all the competitors who joined the challenge [17 total]. Next year I’ll make sure to start things off with more advance notice, and I think I’ll adjust scoring somewhat to even out the first weekend with the rest of the tournament — I think it’s too heavily weighted for the first weekend.

* By “upset”, obviously anyone following this knows that Purdue was the higher seed in both contests. But since the national media, ESPN, CBS, and even the President didn’t think we’d advance past the first round without Robbie Hummel, I’ll call it an upset.