The Official Awl March Madness Bracket Tournament Challenge Update: There Will Be Blog

Wow, what a way to kick off March Madness, am I right? Of the first 16 games, 8 (that’s half) were decided in either OT (overtime) or by 3 points or less. That means things were exceptionally close! For comparison, only nine games TOTAL last year were decided by the same criteria. You know what else is close? The rankings in the ongoing Official Awl March Madness Bracket Tournament Challenge!

There’s a tie at the top of the board between two people, someone named J. Elliott, with his bracket the Detective Goose (figuring out the meaning of that should drive me insane for the rest of the day) and P. Gaines with the Pete’s Jayhawks bracket-I’m going to go out on a limb and say P in “P. Gaines” stands for Pete. Deductive reasoning score! Swish! Still, not one of you has managed to get every single game right. Here’s where most people seem to have gone awry:

• Georgetown sucking balls. I watched almost all of this game and can say that they really were never trying at all and Ohio was playing with some real “Let’s do this!” fervor.

• A big year for Murrays. Not only is the Murray character from “Flight Of The Conchords” seeing a huge-to-mild resurgence by way of his HP ad campaign, but also the school Murray State provided one of the bigger upsets of the day by beating those obnoxious and preppy Vanderbilt Commodores (WTF? How obnoxious is that mascot?) with an insane shot by Danero Thomas as time ran out, sending the mainstream media into a real tizzy. Nice Vera Bradley luggage, losers.

Furthermore, do you guys think anyone at HBO or either of the actual Flight Of The Conchords are seeing any cash from the participation of Rhys Darby in these ads? They never address the character by name and he doesn’t necessarily do anything that’s particularly Murray-ish besides being a New Zealander so it seems like it could really go either way. ALSO, if you google Rhys Darby, you can see a really random picture of him when he’s not all Murray’d up and without a mustache even. So that’s cool/weird I guess?

• A few other upsets. Marquette, with its ugly-ass jerseys (below) lost to Washington, which I believe is located in the state of Washington, and Old Dominion prevailed over Notre Dame. Both games were 11 seeds over 6 seeds with close scores, but one was significantly more exciting than the other, as Notre Dame and Old Dominion scored a total of 100 points. That’s like women’s college basketball scoring, or so I’ve heard. Don’t get me wrong, I love lay-ups and sick mid-range jumpers as much as the next guy, but I don’t respect women’s athletic prowess nearly enough to actually watch them play organized sports, much less look at their box scores.

So here’s the rundown as we enter Day Two: A quick glance shows that most of you have Kansas winning your the whole thing, but Duke, Syracuse, and Kentucky are very much in the mix. This makes sense, since they are the the highest ranked seeds in each of their divisions-who says The Awl audience doesn’t get sports?!

The current highest ranking Awl contributor is Eric “Old Jews Telling Jokes” Spiegelman, while, amongst the staff, Choire and Alex are tied for the 184th position and I am in a modest logjam at 234. But you know what? Winners are not made in the first day of the tournament and it’s a marathon not a sprint and all’s well that ends well.