Here are the three brackets I did for May Madness. The first bracket is my selections for D1. I have Notre Dame, North Carolina, Johns Hopkins, and Duke in the Final Four, with Notre Dame beating Hopkins for the National Championship. This was an extremely difficult bracket to pick from, as there are about 10 teams that have real shorts to make it to the Final Four, and some of them play each other in the first round. There are also about 7 teams that I think are capable of winning a National Championship this year. Every scenario I picked seemed so right, yet so wrong at the same time. This is what I finally decided on.
Given the difficult nature of selecting from this pool of teams, I did a second D1 bracket: the "coin flip bracket." I flipped a coin for each game (the team on top was heads, and the team on bottom was tails), just to see which bracket ended up being better. This Final Four consists of Loyola, Princeton, Duke, and Stony Brook in the Final Four, with Stony Brook winning the National Championship over Princeton. I think it's pretty safe to say that my bracket of picks will end up being better.
Third is the D3 bracket, which has 28 teams vs. D1's 16, and first round games start tonight. I've wanted to fill this out for a few years, but given that I was playing D3 in the NCAA for the last four years, I wasn't sure what the legal ramifications might be. This bracket has fewer upsets in it, as the competition level throughout D3 isn't nearly as tight as it is in D1. Perhaps most interesting to me is that New England College (NH) made the tournament this year. In 2008, my team beat them 10-5. They did leave our conference, which features two top-20 teams, and won their new conference's AQ this year, but it just goes to show you how fast things can change in D3. My D3 Final Four is Cortland State (NY), Tufts (MA), Salisbury (MD), and Stevenson (MD), with Tufts beating Stevenson in the Final.
