As the NCAA Tournament has come to a close, we would like to take some time to recognize the winner of the LBS March Madness pool. Our winner was James, who absolutely destroyed the pool by picking 45 of 63 games correctly. James racked up 141 of a possible 192 points. He finished an incredible 6,926 out of 3,329,637, which places him in the top 99.8 percentile of all Yahoo! Sports Pick ’em participants. At one point, James was ranked No. 238 out of every single participant. That was crazy.
James had Michigan, Syracuse, and Louisville in his Final Four, and correctly predicted that the Cardinals would win it all. We asked him for his key to success.
“Actually I had a Big East bias,” James told LBS regarding his picks. “I wanted it to be a Big East team, and I knew we had a couple of contenders in the tournament.
“It was an up and down year in college basketball, upsets left and right, so I didn’t think it was a longshot for the Cardinals.”
Not many people had Michigan facing Florida in the finals of the South Region, but James did. We wanted to know how he picked that.
“Michigan had a much tougher draw but I knew they could pull through. Florida, on the other hand, didn’t really play anyone up until Michigan.”
Getting as high as 238th out of over 3.3 million is an incredible accomplishment. James put that feeling in context for us, saying it was “pretty epic, but I’ve reached greater heights in my life.”
His favorite pick was choosing Louisville to win it all. He was also proud of correctly predicting Iowa State over Notre Dame and Minnesota over UCLA. Once he got those picks rolling, the success kept coming.
Wondering what his winning bracket looked like? See it below:
