Is it March without a little Madness???
The springtime can always be a little chaotic with upcoming departmental exams and classes, but sometimes it’s nice to watch something else be chaotic. Every year, ESPN hosts it’s annual NCAA March Madness tournament in college basketball for both the men and the women to see if anyone can guess the outcome of every game that is played in their respective tournaments. We attempted this feat last year, but alas, we failed. Since then, we have changed up our strategies, recruited more labs to join our quest for perfection, and we were ready to tackle this feat once again.
Kenzie Ramirez - Usenko Lab
Nya Black - Boucher Lab
Some of the strategies employed ranged from picking their favorite mascot to actually watching college basketball before the tournament started. As you can see by the results below, some strategies fared significantly better than others. Lessons we learned this year: flipping a coin is not the best way to fill out a bracket (Pedro) & proximity to Coldstone has no correlation to how good a basketball team is (Jess). Nevertheless, we did get closer to accomplishing this great feat than we did last year - 3 people picked the correct winner (University of Florida) and many participants got the final 4 correct!
Next year, we plan on filling out both men’s and women’s bracket which means there’s more opportunities to win….right?
“MVP”: Nya Black
“You tried.”: Pedro Huergo
Results:
Nya Black- 1310 pts
Alexes Thurman - 1250 pts
Maddie Bannon - 1240 pts
Holly Wilson - 1200 pts
Stewart Ryberg - 1080 pts
Alexandra Cupples - 1060 pts
Lyssa Garber and Rabin Budhathoki - 750 pts
Irushika Senarathne - 730 pts
Ana Quintero - 640 pts
Elyssia Gallagher - 510 pts
Kenzie Ramirez - 480 pts
Jess Conforti - 370 pts
Pedro Huergo - 300 pts
