After Saturday night’s NCAA March Madness Final Four ended in an exciting fashion with Kentucky-Wisconsin coming down to a last second shot and seven-seeded Connecticut upsetting tournament favorite one-seeded Florida, Monday’s championship game is set to be a seven-seed versus eight-seed match-up with two of the tournament’s last three winners. The Connecticut Huskies took the crown in 2011 and the Kentucky Wildcats won the following year in 2012.
Both of those teams were led by star players with Kemba Walker and Anthony Davis. This year’s teams feature a similar dynamic with Shabazz Napier (UConn guard; 17.9 ppg) and Julius Randle (Kentucky forward; 15.1 ppg, 10.5 rpg). Completing Connecticut’s dynamic backcourt is junior guard Ryan Boatright (12.1 ppg), who unlike Napier, was not a part of that 2011 championship squad.
The Huskies appear to have the advantage on the perimeter, but just as in 2012 Kentucky has a starting five compromising of talented freshmen who make up with athleticism what they lack in experience. The Wildcats feature four players who average over 10 ppg, including the talented twin brothers Andrew and Aaron Harrison. Monday’s game should be a great match-up, but it shouldn’t overshadow what has been a great tournament.
With such an unpredictable March, including a record number of exhilarating overtime games in the first round of play, there is once again nobody remaining with a perfect bracket. The current leader of ESPN’s bracket challenge, “timjwatrous215,” didn’t even achieve perfection in any of the four sections of their bracket.
The results of Whitman’s Bracket Challenge were Josh Kaufman in first place (93.1 percentile on ESPN), Sam Wasserman in second place (91.97 percentile), and junior basketball player Riley Shaver in third place (92.74 percentile). The discrepancies in percentile were because of a different scoring system being employed in each challenge.
With the tournament winding down, those three lucky winners can count their winnings and say they know something about college basketball. All that the rest of us can do is count our losses and hope to make up for them next year.
