Early winners from the NCAA men’s tournament: Presidential brackets, the betting public and chalk
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An NCAA Tournament that opened with madness settled into chalk after the round of 32 finished on Sunday. For the first time since 2019, and only the fifth time in the tournament’s history, all the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds have advanced to the Sweet 16.
Coming off last year’s historically low-seeded Final Four, it looked like parity would again reign supreme when a No. 14, No. 13, two No. 12 and three No. 11 seeds won their opening matchups this year. Alas, the clock struck midnight during the second round for all but one of this year’s aspiring Cinderellas. And the lone double-digit interloper in the otherwise surprise-free Sweet 16 came via the South region when a matchup guaranteed to produce a low-seeded Sweet 16 team saw No. 11 NC State take down No. 14 Oakland in OT.
What’s been bad for fans of small school underdogs looking for a prolonged moment in the spotlight has been good for the NCAA tournament and their broadcasting partners. Ratings across the first three days have been the highest of all time, with an average of 9 million viewers watching the games played through Saturday.
Another winner from this surprising run of favorites domination is presidential brackets. In his tournament preview show, “King Charles,” on CNN, Charles Barkley skewered Barack Obama’s bracket-picking as too “traditional” and akin to “copying off everyone else’s paper.”
Barkley might have some ground left on which to defend his comment that “he [Obama] just cheated off everyone in America.” But he can’t argue with the results that Obama or President Joe Biden have seen so far.
One final beneficiary of a bracket mostly following true to seeds has been the betting public, who parlayed a weekend of money line favorites going 15-1 into scoring an elusive chink in the “house always wins” armor.
In an interview with ESPN, John Murray, the executive director of the Super Book in Las Vegas, compared this weekend’s NCAA tournament to a “bad college football Saturday.” Murray went on to say:
“Saturday was pretty ugly, we were up a decent number halfway through the day, but you could see the liabilities building. We needed Texas [vs. Tennessee] or Oakland [vs. NC State] to break up the parlays, but both fell short. By the time we got to the last game, we were stuck. Everyone parlays all the favorites … they aren’t supposed to all win,” he added. “We move on.”
With three rounds and fifteen games left to play, there’s plenty of time for the madness to take back over, but through the first two rounds, the clear upset of the tournament has been the lack of many upsets at all.
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