On April 6th, March Madness held its final game. UConn and Michigan faced off, with Michigan bringing home the March Madness title after scoring 63 against UConn. March Madness is the popular nickname for the annual NCAA Division tournament. It consists of 68 college teams playing against each other. It is a single-elimination tournament that goes from March through early April. The competition consists of 7 rounds. March Madness has been going on since 1939. It has been going on ever since then.
WMC freshman Dean Jones participated in March Madness and completed a bracket for this year. Jones said he knows a lot of people who are participating in the bracket and that it’s popular. He also later mentioned that there was money involved in these games. People tend to bet on the teams they think will win. Jones says that he relies on both status and gut feeling when picking his bracket. “I usually just do stats for the 1st season, 2nd season, and then the rest is kind of my gut feeling” Jones said. He explained that people usually pick all the best teams in the first round, and there’s always a bad team that beats a good team and creates upsets.
In Jones’s bracket, he had Duke versus Michigan in the semifinals. Jones also mentioned that High Point in the beginning, really stood out to him. High Point did end up losing before the finals. Jones expressed that the biggest upsets of this season were “either Florida or Duke losing before the finals.”
Anthony Paumi, WMC 9th grader, also completed a March Madness bracket. He said that he has a group of around 22 friends who all fill out brackets and see who is most accurate at the end. When picking his bracket, he said, “ I watch previous games to see who I think is gonna win certain matchups and then decide from there.” Paumi mostly relies on statistics when picking for his bracket and picks teams that perform on the highest levels. According to Paumi, people’s biggest mistakes when making the brackets are that they don’t always pick fan favorites, and fan favorites are usually the teams that end up winning. For his semi-finals, he mentioned, “I had Arizona. Anthony and Duke making it to the finals this year.” His overall winner was Ariozana. Yaxel Lemonboard mostly stood out to Paumi this year “because he carried Michigan to the win.” Paumi’s biggest upset was Wisconsin losing to High Point.
West Morris students seem to be excited about this year’s March Madness bracket results and can’t wait to do it again next year.
