FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The first night of March Madness ended in several upsets leaving a lot of people’s brackets in shambles.
“The odds of getting a perfect bracket, pretty low. They are one in 9.2 quintillions. So those odds basically say you’re more likely to become a professional basketball player than you are a perfect bracket,” said Megan Sanctorum.
Tis’ the season for March Madness, the time of year when non-sports fans decide to fill out a bracket and become basketball fans for a few weeks. Megan Sanctorum, spokeswoman for Louisianasharp.com, an online betting website. She says this is a chance for people who don’t know anything about basketball to have a fair shot.
“We’ve seen a couple of pretty big upsets so far. A lot of people had Kentucky in the elite 8 and here we are so if you’re one of those people who made their bracket based off mascots or colors, you may end up doing better than someone who picked based off seeds alone,” she said.
While most people spend about 30 minutes filling out their bracket, some people spend as long as two hours. John Bogar thought his bracket was really good until Iowa and Kentucky lost.
“I deliberated with my friends for a few days and thought I had a really good bracket and it didn’t take long for me to completely bust it. Two of my final four teams lost in the first round and I’m at the bottom of the leaderboard today,” Bogar said.
And like many people just filling out one bracket isn’t enough.
“I do one where I’m real serious and really try and pick the teams that I think are going to win and that’s usually my worst one. And then I do one where I have Arkansas winning it all every year and that one is actually doing a lot better than the other one,” Bogar said.
Guy Liljenwall took it to another level filling out 8 brackets.
“Last year I only did one and it turned out to be a horrible bracket, so I kind of wanted to have at least one good one this year, so I thought if I increased the number of brackets that I put out, I could increase my odds of having one good one,” he said.
But not everyone’s brackets are in shambles. Nick Stratos says he didn’t suffer too much.
“Iowa and Kentucky were pretty rough. That kind of put it off track a little bit but for the most part, it’s not too bad. We got some big games today, so we’ll see how it goes,” Stratos said.
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