Upsets All Around: Your Awl Tournament Bracket Competition Update
What a weekend! Universal health care reform! Extremely nice weather in New York! And the fall of Pete’s Jayhawks from the top of the Official Awl Tournament Bracket Competition! These three things are all of equal value and importance! In case you were outside all weekend and not paying attention to basketball, here’s what you missed.
• You know what sucks? The Big East. With eight entries in the tournament, a lot of people thought the Big East had a chance to really solidify themselves as THE dominant college basketball conference. But what ended up happening instead? A lot of their pretty good teams (Villanova, Georgetown and Pittsburgh) lost much, much earlier than expected, and now they’re holding on to the hope that Syracuse can win it all to help the conference save face. In case that previous sentence didn’t make any sense to you, it’s like Avatar having lost all of the technical categories, like Sound Editing and whatever, and now it’s halfway through the Oscars and they’re hoping to pull out Best Picture. Who will be this tournament’s super hot Kathryn Bigelow to dash James Cameron’s dreams? (Remember, James Cameron is the Big East here.) I guess that’s what we’ll find out over the next two weeks! Great analogy, right? Swish!
• You know what also sucks? Kansas. After being picked by more than 42% of brackets done on ESPN to win the whole thing, Kansas was ushered out of the tournament by a team from Northern Iowa. I had no idea there even was a northern Iowa. Are there even enough significant parts of Iowa to break it up into geographical regions like that? Sorry, I’m being excessively bitter because Kansas’ loss completely devastated my bracket. My apologies to Iowa.
• Look out School of Hotel Administration, Cornell is known for basketball now! That’s right, after shocking the world and much of northern New York state on Friday to win their first tournament game ever, the Big Red beat Wisconsin to become the first Ivy League school since 1979 to make it to the Sweet 16. That’s right, Cornell! The secret Ivy! The Ivy the other Ivies will only grudgingly admit to as a fellow Ivy under extreme duress! More importantly though, have you guys seen how White all of these guys are? They look like the pre-Bryan Russell Utah Jazz/current Indiana Pacers out there. Look at these great White Guy celebration pictures!
Here’s where things are now, standings-wise: Friday’s early leaders, Detective Goose (I still don’t know what that means) and Peter’s Jayhawks, fell from grace and into the dregs of rankings pages 2–7 and, while Peter’s Jayhawks still remain remotely in the chase, considering he picked Kansas to win the whole thing I’m not sure how long that will last.
The new Peter’s Jayhawks is someone named Seth Freedland who, by way of a lack of me mentioning previously that we were only looking for one entry per person, is now occupying three of the top six positions. Otherwise, the only Awl contributor left on the front page is Dan Shanoff. Dan also picked Kansas to take it home, so eventually he’s gonna get screwed too.
Some of the particularly underperforming Awl contributors include Seth Colter Walls and Mary HK Choi, currently both on page six of seven, which seems more reasonable to expect from one than the other. (Mary actually asked, “What sport is this for again?” while filling out her bracket, although Seth Colter Walls has gone to the opera four times in the last six days, so I guess that one actually could be considered a push.) Speaking of Page Six, gossip “reporter” Neel Shah finds himself on the page three of rankings. Neel has Syracuse winning it all, so there’s a possibility he might make a late surge, but realistically, probably not.
As far as Awl staff goes, I’m on the second page, Balk is on the fourth, and Choire is on the sixth. Since we’ve all got Kansas as the champion, expect for that distribution to remain mostly same and for none of us to win. Which is probably how it should be.