Brackets, busted.
The handful of remaining perfect brackets in the NCAA Tournament busted out on Sunday, ending the hopes of millions against exceptionally long odds.
The final perfect brackets on Yahoo Sports and CBS Sports were shredded with Saturday’s games. Top-seeded Florida’s 77-75 win over two-time reigning national champion UConn continued the carnage on Sunday.
Duke’s 89-66 win over Baylor left one remaining perfect bracket on ESPN’s tracker and it didn’t last long. That bracket imploded with Kentucky’s 84-75 win over Illinois, creating 24.3 million imperfect brackets.
The Wildcats’ win also killed off the last bracket of the 34 million on the NCAA’s platform.
Michigan’s 91-79 win over Texas A&M on Saturday night shredded the final perfect Yahoo Sports bracket. Poor Shawno had been correct on every pick with his Grand Bracket until the fifth-seeded Wolverines sent the fourth-seeded Aggies home.
CBS Sports lost its last perfect bracket with Saturday night’s games, including No. 6 seed BYU’s two-point win over third-seeded Wisconsin and Texas Tech’s 77-64 win over No. 11 seed Drake.
Creighton was listed as ESPN’s top bracket buster after its 89-75 win over Louisville in Thursday’s first game, knocking out 13,339,089.
On the other end of the spectrum, ESPN reported that every pick was wrong on 30 of its brackets — a nearly impossible feat in its own right even if a contestant were trying to pick all losers.
In the world of office pools, one person who works for one of the companies Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns predicted the games well enough to win $1 million. Berkshire said Monday that the FlightSafety International employee correctly picked 31 of the 32 games in the opening round, including the first 29 games in a row. Eleven other people won $100,000 prizes in the companywide pool for Berkshire’s 392,000 employees by picking 31 winners in the first round.
This year marks the first time a Berkshire employee has won the top prize, although Buffett’s company has routinely been handing out $100,000 for the best bracket every year. Buffett tweaked the rules of the contest this year to make it easier for someone to win the million-dollar prize.
