0 left: March Madness upsets the ultimate pursuit of the perfect bracket

The pursuit of the perfect March Madness bracket will have to wait another year. Again.

(AP) — The pursuit of the perfect March Madness the bracket will have to wait another year. Again.

In the men’s tournament, where the No. 2 and No. 4 seeds lost on Day 1, only a relative handful of nets remained intact in the biggest competition as No. 16 Fairleigh Dickinson took the field against Purdue. Knights stunned the top-seeded Boilermakers Friday night, sending the rest of the perfect brackets into trash cans everywhere.

According to Jared Shanker, the network’s senior director of digital communications, CBS Sports had 0.0003% of networks perfect through Friday’s eight early games. After a few hours, the network wrote that ” March for burst bracket “when describing a goose egg.

Consider that 98.7% of CBS viewers picked Purdue to beat FDU, while only 0.4% picked FDU to reach the Sweet 16. The network reported that Purdue was 38.4% in the Final Four, and 8.8% Boilermakers won a national championship.

There is no perfection for ESPN’s Tournament Challenge network game, either; only 22 brackets out of more than 20 million completed were perfect earlier Friday, and they disappeared when the games ended.

The same for NCAA March Madness. There is not one left, out of undetermined millions.

Wins by double-digit seeds Princeton, PA and Furman on Thursday were particularly damaging. Only 1.4% of ESPN groups have all three teams out of the first round, and only 0.1% have them make it through the weekend. Fairlie Dickinson delivered the final blow.

A University of Illinois professor who runs an analytics website said Friday he thinks the transfer portal has hurt some of the conference’s powerhouse schools in the NCAA tournament.

Changes brought about by an increasingly active portal have reduced cohesion within some of the umbrella programs, he said. Sheldon Jacobson, who runs BracketOdds. Lower-seeded teams from the middle of major conferences are more likely to have a core group of players who have been together for three or four years.

Seven No. 15 seeds have won at least one game in the last 11 years, including each of the last three NCAA Tournament appearances for the first time. The last, of course, was Princeton over Arizona this week. I No. 13 Furman edged out No. 4 Virginia in another big upset — even before FDU ousted Purdue.

“So even though it looks like, ‘Wow, we’ve got this big upset,’ statistically speaking, it’s not that unusual,” Jacobson said. “There’s not much difference between a five, six or seven and a 10, 11 or 12. Certainly a five, six and seven will win more often, but statistically speaking, not much more often.”

Jacobson said a day of upsets often leads to predictable results the next day. Most of Friday was like that until the FDU-Purdue game.

Looking ahead to the Final Four, Jacobson said the averages show that at least one of the teams usually comes from outside the top five seeds in each region. Four No. 8s advanced to the Final Four and five No. 11s.

“This data says, yes, you need a No. 1 or two,” Jacobson said. a big piece of shit.

“All the sports pundits are saying, ‘I can’t imagine any of them losing.’ I guarantee they will lose. In fact, I guarantee two of them will lose and maybe three before we get to the Final Four.”