Hello all, and welcome to the very first update to the 2024 NCAA Tournament Bracket Pool. For those of you that have noticed some posts from a different form of monetary entertainment system regarding this year's NCAA Tournament. That is a different game from the standard bracket pool being hosted by another of WeMakeItRain's contributors. You should pretty easily note the differences between the two once you click on a post, but the tournament pool will have a title similar to the one on this post, depicting the round and the day to which it applies.
Now that we have cleared that up ... Thank you all for joining the pool We have 136 entrants and it does take some time to go through that many brackets each day, at least through the first weekend, so please give me some leeway in getting the posts up the following day. They will always be as soon as I am able to post.
With regard to the 136 entries, I would like to make special mention to some. Chris Pettit of Tallahassee, Florida and Olympia, Washington is a newcomer to the pool, and boy was he excited. He was the first person to send me his entry - on SUNDAY NIGHT!!! He must have really been excited as he sent in a bracket without a name, e-mail address, city, or guaranteed bonus. Chris is an intelligent guy, so I assume it was because of his excitement, and not because he is illiterate like Tyler Kolek of Marquette (please look up if you don't know - this is a diss at Kolek, not Chris.)
Another early entrant was Allison Parker of Washington, D.C., who very artfully placed a heart next to Duke, meaning she might not be invited back next year - not with that attitude! Especially since she is a Cougar - from Washington State - get your minds out of the gutter.
The opposite of early entrants would be those who send in their entrants at the last minute. That includes Carolyn Fowler of Greenacres, Florida who, although she had her brackets completed timely, was waiting for the remainder of her household to finish theirs. Jane Reynolds of Greenacres, Florida, a former professional golf rules official, was one of those taking her time curating her bracket. Carolyn shared this picture with me, and gave me permission to post it here.
We have had a couple of changes with some entrants in our pool that note some mention. Longtime participate Colonel Kareem Montague of Fort Carson, Colorado is no longer a member of our illustrious pool - but that is because he has been replaced by Brigadier General Kareem Montague of Fort Carson, Colorado. Congratulations Kareem. Another longtime particpant, Ty Leatherman of Wilmington, North Carolina did not submit an entry, but Ty Hedgpeth of Wilmington, North Carolina did - and she brought along a fellow that shares the last name Hedgpeth! Congratulations you two!
And, once you start reviewing the standings, you will see a Max Macon of Jupiter, Florida and a Max Marion of West Palm Beach, Florida, each with 4 entries. I will try my absolute best to make sure I keep the appropriate person labeled to the appropriate bracket.
For the pool, we have 21 different champions selected by various entrants, all except for Michigan State selected by multiple entries. So if you see an unusual championt, know that more than 1 person thinks that team is going to win the championship. Also, as is always the case, we already lost a champion yesterday; see if you can guess which team that is! (More on that later).
I will continually list all predicted champions, with those remaining in all capital letters and bolded. Our champions are: ALABAMA, AUBURN, ARIZONA, BAYLOR, CONNECTICUT, CREIGHTON, DUKE, FLORIDA, FLORIDA ATLANTIC, GONZAGA, HOUSTON, ILLINOIS, IOWA STATE, KANSAS, Kentucky, MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN STATE, NORTH CAROLINA, NORTH CAROLINA STATE, PURDUE, and TENNESSEE.
Yes, you guessed it. We lost Kentucky. I am still not well. I contemplated scrapping the whole tournament and returning everyone's money. But, I will push through. (That reminds me - if you have not paid your entry fee, please do that before the Sweet Sixteen starts - but hopefully earlier.) (And, more on Kentucky later.)
The first game to tip-off was an 8/9 matchup of Missippi State v. Michigan Statea, and four brackets succumbed to simply selecting MSU. Well, 3 did, one went so far as selecting MISU. Still didn't work. So Jenna Finkelstein of St. Petersburg, Florida, Ty Hedgpeth of Wilmington, North Carilona, Max Marion of West Palm Beach, Florida and Silas Nichols of Washington, DC do not receive the point they may, or may not have earned. In that game Michigan State pulled a Tom Izzo and won a game in the tournament many thought they couldn't/wouldn't.
All in all we had 4 upsets that qualified for bonus points - Oakland defeated Kentucky (more on that later); 11 seed Duquense defeated BYU; 11 seed Oregon defeated South Carolina, and 11 seed North Carolina State defeated Texas Tech. I would be very leery of 11 seed New Mexico today if I was Clemson.
Most of the games were pretty boring or just rather blaise, so not much to recap. The few that were exciting included Duquesne getting by BYU 71-67; Dayton defeating Nevada 63-60 after trailing 56-39 with under 8 minutes left in the game; Washington State over Drake [Ed. Note - man am I glad HE lost] 66-61; Oakland besting Kentucky 80-76 (again, more on that later), and Kansas squeaking past Samford 93-89, when this late block was called a foul:
Seriously, that was called a foul!!!
Now, onto the Kentucky loss. All you need to know about this game is that 6th-year/24 year old guard Jack Gohlke scored 32 points on 10-20 shooting from three-point range. He also shot 10-20 for the entire game. You read that right - HE TOOK ZERO TWO-POINT SHOTS. My dude was on-fire, hitting 7, YES 7, three-pointers in the first half. Hannah Sosa of Riviera Beach, Florida a/k/a Racecar was calling him "Steve Sanders" as it looked like he was a 33 year old playing a college basketball player in a tv show. Apparently she wasn't the only one.
Congratulations Jack Gohlke, you are now an NCAA tournament immortal, right up there with Bryce Drew and Ali Faroukmanesh. Gohlke's ten threes have to be some kind of record, right? Hmmmm, that reminds me ....
So, it seems obvious to just explore the top three-pointing shooting performances in tournament history, but I already wrote about Loyola Marymount's Jeff Fryer's 11 made threes from the 1990 tournament back in 2019. You can read that HERE. I wrote about that because during that tournament Purdue's Carsen Edwards had games where he made 10, and 9 three pointers. Also hitting 10 in a tournament game was Memphis' Robert Sallie in 2009 and UNLV's Freddie Banks in 1987. None of those seemed like interesting stories to me - except for Edwards' run, but that was so recent that a good number of us probably remember that. But then I remember the 1996 NCAA Championship game (sorry Silas.)
Kentucky (34-2) played Syracuse (29-9) on April Fool's Day in East Rutherford, New Jersey. That Kentucky team was loaded, led by Tony Delk and Antoine Walker, with Anthony Epps, Derek Anderson, and Walter McCarty also starting. The Wildcats had depth also, bringing Mark Pope, Ron Mercer, Jeff Sheppard - future 1998 Tournament Most Outstanding Player and father of current Wildcat player Reed Sheppard - and Allen Edwards. Syracuse had tour-de-force John Wallace, possibly the biggest one player carries a team to the finals since Kansas' Danny Manning in 1998. Wallace did not disappoint, going for 29 points and 10 rebounds. Kentucky, however, proved too much with Ron Mercer scoring 20 off-the-bench to compliment Tony Delk's 24 as the Wildcats won the title 76-67.
But it wasn't just Delk's 24 points that were the story of the game - it was how he scored them. He was 7-12 from three point range, hitting six in the first half, just one shy of Gohlke's total last night against Kentucky. Delk's performance may have caused this statement made at the game by Libby Pataki, the wife of New York Governor George Pataki, as Syracuse took the Court after halftime - a statement overheard by Silas Nichols of Washington, DC as he was at the game - "That's OK, you can stay in the zone Coach [Boeheim] - there is no way he hits more than 5 this half!" Well, I guess she was right.
Delk was drafted 16th overall in the 1996 draft by the Charlotte Hornets, bouncing around a number of NBA teams for 10 seasons, and playing two overseas. In 2001, while playing for the Phoenix Suns, Tony Delk scored 53 points on 20-27 shooting, the only time he scored over 30. I believe it is the only instance of a player scoring 50 points in the NBA having never scored more than 30 in any other game - but honestly I do not feel like looking that up as I am concentrating on the college game today.
And yes, I wrote this history for two reasons: (1) because I might not get to post anything good about my Wildcats for who knows how many years; and (2) to get the Libby Pataki quote into this blog.
I just hope Gohlke has a heckuva second-round game so I can tell the story of Ali Faroukmanesh's tournament run.
Given Gohlke's performance, he is definitely one of the Players of the Day. But, he didn't have the best performance. The Players of the Day are:
Players of the Day
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