NCAA PERFECT BRACKET WATCH: Part Zero: The Ball Is Tipped...

But what I WILL DO this year is something which I actually enjoy.

There are, to me, two main joys of March Madness:  The madness of the First Round (and, sometimes, the Second -- and rarely, the additional rounds (Butler, Florida-Gulf Coast, etc.)), and the bracket pools.

Since I no longer run or participate in bracket pools (I wonder if ol' Plum City HS is still doing the bracket pools that good ol' Mr. Larson, the boys' coach, would do (I don't even know if Forrest Larson is still ALIVE!) -- entrusting his trusty statistician (me) with the numbers.), what I do now instead of playing is follow the bracket pools.

The NCAA has bowed to the realities of their tournament and not only runs a pool themselves but keeps a blog together of a Perfect Bracket Watch.  It tracks all of the brackets in four major online bracket games:  ESPN, Yahoo!, CBS Sports, and the NCAA's own game -- in the pursuit of the elusive Perfect Bracket...

Or, every year til now, the last to fall...

Prizes this year for the full tournament games:

ESPN:  One bracket which selects the national champion wins $50,000 (random drawing of all who select the champ).  25 players who play the full allotment of 25 full brackets will random draw for $1,000 each, regardless of result (The Mike Golic Prize).  Though ESPN will track perfect brackets, I believe for the first time -- the NCAA website keeps track of that as well as three other games, there is no prize for perfection.  Women's tournament has the same, and equal, prize structure.

Yahoo:  $25,000 for the best bracket score, each tournament gives one.  The only one of the four main online games to actually restrict it's prize to the top finisher in the pool.

NCAA:  Most-expenses paid (set amount for airfare, etc.) trip to the 2024 Final Four of the gender in which the player got into the top 1% of all scores in the NCAA game for the 2023 tournament, and then won a random drawing between all others who did the same in that tournament.

CBS:  Same base grand prize as the NCAA, a bit more expenses for airfare, hotel, etc.  You only have to get in the top 10% of all CBS Sports brackets to get in that drawing.  Anyone who enters both the Men's and Women's contests is put in a random drawing for a 2023 Nissan ARIYA and $500 of snacks.  The Nissan is worth over $60,000, the largest prize of the four main online pools the NCAA tracks.

Last to fall, per the NCAA's own research, which goes back to at least 2014:

• 2022:  Bekins24 of the ESPN game is the last to fall (Game 27) -- best of the ESPN first round only could go 30-2, 15 such brackets.
• 2021:  Katie C. Crouse was the only ESPN 31-1 in the first round.  Yahoo could get no better than 29-3.  The last perfect made it to Game 30.
• 2019:  The year of Center Road -- the all-time verified record-holder.  (There is a disputed report of an early ESPN-game bracket which did run the table, but that was probably with being able to pick round to round.)  Neurophysicist Gregg Nigl of Ohio actually made it to the second weekend -- and was sent by the NCAA and Buick to the Anaheim Regional (favorite team was Michigan, who played in that region) as a result.  It finally fell in Game 50.  Tennessee needed a double-digit rally to force overtime to overturn the perfect bracket.
• No brackets survived the first round in 2016 or 2018.  Meaning that only twice since 2016 (2017 and 2019) has a bracket survived the First Round perfect.
• The all-time record before Nigl went down on Game 40 (the last game of Day Three) in 2017.  The record before that was 36 (halfway through Day Three) in 2014.

And I set this to post at 8:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time on Thursday.  Within an hour of that posting, the pursuit begins anew.  How far will someone get?

I'll put the Over/Under at about last year's Game 27, because this has been a quite open season.