If you picked the 2016 Final Four correctly, you're lying
So, how do your brackets look right now? If you're like the rest of America, there's but one answer:
Here are nine stats showing how it was rough sledding, mainly because of one team from upstate New York that busted as many brackets as Middle Tennessee State. (The big difference: MTSU actually deserved its bid.)
1. As recently as February, a Vegas sports book had Syracuse as 1000/1 favorite to win the national title, a payout one of the book's officials said they've never paid out. One bettor wagered $100, meaning he has $100,000 on the line this weekend. (Hedge?) In all, four punters took that action and now are the biggest Jim Boeheim fans this side of Jim Boeheim.
2. ESPN had more than 13 million entries for its tournament challenge. Just 1,140 got every Final Four team (0.009%). That sounds unbelievably small but it actually comes out to about 1 in 11,000 entries, which means if you took the 75,000 people expected to attend the Final Four games in Houston, you'd expect seven to have nailed down Villanova/Oklahoma/UNC/Syracuse. What does that show? Guessing the first three teams was pretty easy. (Also, only 0.2% of poolers picked Syracuse to win it all. That was the same as Florida Gulf Coast, Michigan and Gonzaga.)
3. President Obama only picked one Final Four team correctly. Donald Trump got seven. (I just had a terrifying thought. What if we, as a nation, have a president next March that doesn't publicly fill out a bracket? No, no. It's too painful to think about.)
4. Hours after Duke cut down the nets last year, Bovada put up odds for which teams would win the 2016 title. UNC was first at (5/1) - pretty good work there, Vegas - while Kentucky (8/1), Maryland (12/1) and Virginia (12/1) rounded out the top three. Those weren't so great, with the exception of UVA, which was a good pick for the first 1,477 minutes of their season. The odds for the other Final Four teams, along with their "rank."
T8. Oklahoma (25/1)
T8. Villanova (25/1)
T34. Syracuse (66/1)
5. According to the numbers of stat guru Ken Pomeroy, here were the pre-tournament odds of each team winning, along with their rank. These are steeper than gambling odds because KenPom simply runs the numbers and doesn't need to worry about the exposure of making a team 770/1.
4. North Carolina: 1 in 10 chance
5. Villanova: 1 in 14 chance
6. Oklahoma: 1 in 18 chance
46. Syracuse: 1 in 770 chance
That proves both the power of the numbers and the existence of outliers.
(Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
6. But what were the odds to just make the Final Four? Here's what KenPom's numbers had pre-tourney. (Ranking refers to where teams ranked in the region projections.)
Villanova (2nd in South): 13.9%
Oklahoma (1st in West): 24.1%
North Carolina (1st in East): 32.3%
Syracuse (8th in East): 1.5%
(Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
No matter the team, the odds of making the Final Four are never that much better than 33%. Like we discussed with Kansas earlier today, it just proves how much skill, luck and timing go into winning it all.
7. Entering the Sweet 16, Syracuse was still given just a 1.3% chance of winning it all. The only teams with worse odds: Maryland, Wisconsin and Notre Dame.
8. This is the fourth time in five years that every Final Four team had already made an appearance since 2000. I don't know why, but I found that stunning. The Final Four rarely spreads the wealth.
9. My seven-year-old nephew is beating me in my pool.