It was a little too cold today to golf (although it has gotten nice this afternoon). So, I figured I should at least close out my bracketology page as a way to spend some time before Illinois and Iowa kick off the Elite 8 at 6 pm. And I was shocked. I wasn\u2019t in a hurry because I figured with missing SMU, I would be in last place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, a very weird thing happened this year. The Lunatic normally is happy with the number of teams he gets right but because he is rushing Sunday afternoon to seed the teams, he does poorly with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well – all the media members that I track on the Bracket Matrix got all 68 teams correct so you would figure my miss on the last team in the field (SMU) would make for a miserable showing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, I got 58 of the 68 teams seeds correct!!!! And I only was off by more than 1 seed on St. John\u2019s (I foolishly thought that the Big East championship would bump them up a couple lines). So by the scoring system on the Bracket Matrix, I beat all the media members (with the closest being ESPN\u2019s Joe Lunardi and NCAA.com\u2019s Andy Katz at 381 pts to my 383 pts).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While I don\u2019t know him, a special callout goes to Antonio Barbetta, a student at Indiana University. He was the Bracket Matrix winner with 68 correct, 61 correctly seeded and only one team off by more than 1 seed line (he had Vanderbilt as a 3 seed instead of a 5 seed).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that made the Lunatic happy – especially considering that his handicapping has been the worst he has ever done since doing this. I enter the Elite 8 down $715 imaginary dollars. I literally went 0-8 against the spread in the Sweet 16. Any time I thought a team would win but not cover, they routed them. Any time I thought a team would cover, it would be close. And then you have teams like MSU, Houston and Nebraska outright losing. I could not be more wrong when I tried to seriously analyze things. With only 7 games left, the best I can do if I get all the spreads and all the totals correct, I still lose 295.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I seriously debated about just stopping – and actually I might for the Final Four so that the Lunatic\u2019s handicapping isn\u2019t possibly influencing who wins the National Championship (the Lunatic believes in Karma and so I can\u2019t have who I write on a page impact these amazing athletes). So for the Elite 8, instead of trying to handicap the games, I picked all of them to be overs (since it is more fun to watch when teams are trading baskets left and right). And since I want to see the Big 10 do well, I took Illinois, Purdue, Michigan and Duke. I don\u2019t know if I was trying to handicap the games that I would pick that but I figure I will go with the approach of picking the team you want to see win instead of something silly like Illinois winning but Iowa keeping it close to cover the spread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyways, I have my lucky Purdue shirt on. I have my lucky socks on. I have on the Purdue quarterzip that I desperately put on for extra luck in the Texas game. The Lunatic is ready for tonight!!!! BOILER UP!!!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Elite 8 is starting in about 20 minutes – and I can not wait!!!!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a little too cold today to golf (although it has gotten nice this afternoon). So, I figured I should at least close out my bracketology page as a way to spend some time before Illinois and Iowa kick off the Elite 8 at 6 pm. And I was shocked. I wasn\u2019t in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2026-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3607,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3606\/revisions\/3607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}