The Bench Jockeys

 March 21, 2015 – The most exciting 36 hours in college sports ended with a bang as the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament concluded late last night with the 11th seed, Dayton knocking out Providence in a final coup d’ grace bracket buster.  The flurry of upsets that began on Thursday afternoon with with 3 one-point victories by UAB, Georgia State and UCLA served notice yet again to both fans and bettors that on any given day the prohibitive favorites can fall to an ambitious buzzsaw and dreams of playing on a Sweet 16 weekend can end early.  Hope you enjoyed your stay, ISU, VCU and SMU; please pick up the play-at-home game on your way out of the arena.

On Friday, higher seeds prevailed in 15 of the 16 matchups but even in a tournament where only 5 lower seeds emerged victorious in the 32 first round games, there is only 1 entry out the 11.57 million entries on ESPN’s Tournament Challenge that picked all 32 contests correctly.  1!  There are 38 entries that had 31 of the 32 teams picked correctly;  that’s .000328% of all ESPN’s brackets.   So when Iowa State and Baylor fell before you left the office on Thursday and you tore your office pool bracket sheet to shreds, feel some solace that you were not alone.  In fact, you might want to pull that baby out of the trashcan and tape that it back together.  As long as you didn’t have the Cyclones or Bears advancing too far, you may be still in line for a payday, because on the whole, favorites did much better than they have in recent years.  The chalk still talks going into the weekend games.

And speaking of a payout, I will leave you with this report from Vegas… Kentucky was 1:500 to beat Hampton and some schlub bet $600 on Kentucky.  The spoils of his wager… $1.20.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2015 at 03:33 and is filed under College Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.