Through day 2 of this March Madness, I still have a couple of brackets which are doing pretty well. I have different brackets on ESPN, Yahoo! Sports and Facebook. I’ll break each one down but the best of the 3 is a tie with ESPN and Yahoo! Sports both having 26/32 correct picks and then Facebook only one game behind at 25/32 but that might be the one in the best shape.

A couple of things to note before my review:

• With round one now complete … the ESPN.com Tournament Challenge looks like this:
• Approximately 4.8 million completed brackets were submitted.
• There are no brackets that are completely correct.
• There are 3 brackets that have missed only one game.
• There are 95 brackets that have missed two games.
• There are 1,111 brackets that have missed three games.
• Most brackets, on average, have missed 10 games.

  Click ‘Read more‘ to read the rest of review of my brackets.

ESPN: (Link to Bracket)

Correct Upsets: (9) Northern Iowa, (10) Georgia Tech, (10) Missouri, (10) St. Mary’s, (11) Old Dominion, (11) Washington, (12) Cornell, (13) Murray State:
I was beginning to get a little worried in this bracket with so many upsets and I did get burned on a couple too many 5/12 calls but was rewarded for my faith in a weaker Big East and picking ODU and Washington to beat Notre Dame and Marquette. 8/9 and even 7/10 to an extent I don’t consider upsets as much but 11+ are the real ones where this should not happen but it does — every year. Congrats to Cornell and Murray State and hopefully they can win a game or two more and bust some more brackets.

Incorrect Favorites: (3) Georgetown and (8) Texas:
I don’t think anyone in their right would have taken Ohio to upset Georgetown. A really tough year in the early goings for Big East might have them re-evaluating the tough conference schedule and tournament but I don’t think you change anything. You see favorites like Syracuse and Pittsburgh really blowing their opponents out like they should and a Villanova team that really struggled down the stretch showed it in a tough one against Robert Morris.

As for Texas, they had that game to win. A missed free throw inside 10 seconds and unable to come up with a semi-loose ball in the paint allowed Wake Forest to come down the court and eventually hit the game winner. Tough way for Texas to go out but it just symbolizes how rocky of a season it was for a team that was ranked #1 in the country at one point in the season.

Final Four: (1) Kansas, (1) Duke, (4) Wisconsin, (7) BYU.

Champion: (1) Kansas defeats (1) Duke.

Overall: This bracket does have 3 incorrect picks from the Sweet 16 and ideally, you only want to lose 1 or 2 from the first round but I will take it for now. I really like what I have done in this bracket in terms of upset predictions but I think this one finishes 3rd best out of the 3 I am listing in this post.

Yahoo! Sports: (Link to Bracket)

Correct Upsets: (9) Northern Iowa, (10) St. Mary’s, (12) Cornell, (13) Murray State:
No new upsets here from above, nothing more to add here.

Incorrect Favorites: (3) Georgetown, (6) Marquette, (6) Notre Dame, (7) Clemson, (7) Oklahoma State:
Way too many favorites there incorrectly picked and this is more of a protection bracket in the chance that Big East did not fail, this would have done even better than where it is right now at 26/32.

Final Four: (1) Duke, (1) Syracuse, (2) West Virginia, (6) Tennessee.

Champion: (1) Duke defeats (1) Syracuse.

Overall: Incorrectly picking Notre Dame and Marquette to be in the Sweet 16 might end up costing me in this bracket but I like my chances for it to finish 2nd best out of the 3. 13/16 still alive for the Sweet 16 but no mistakes into the Elite 8 yet and hopefully that will carry me.

Facebook: (Link to Bracket)

Correct Upsets: (9) Wake Forest, (10) St. Mary’s, (11) Old Dominion, (11) Washington, (12) Cornell, (13) Murray State:
New Mexico State and Utah State gave me momentary glimpses of hope that every single one of my predicted upsets would come true but it was not meant to be.

Incorrect Favorites: (3) Georgetown, (7) Oklahoma State, (7) Clemson, (8) UNLV:
Less than a handful of incorrect favorites here and selections of OK St and Clemson were just foolish on my part to think they might pull out the win even though they were overrated coming into the tournament.

Final Four: (1) Syracuse, (2) Villanova, (3) New Mexico, (4) Maryland.

Champion: (2) Villanova defeats (1) Syracuse.

Overall: By far, the best shape any of my brackets are in. 7 incorrect picks in the first round but I have none of those teams advancing into the Sweet 16 and all of those teams are still in tact. I think (6) Tennessee should be able to beat (14) Ohio and (5) Butler might be able to hang on against (13) Murray State where the right half of this bracket for me is basically chalk — only into the Sweet 16 though.

Before you go out and blindly fill out your bracket, here are some historical information on the seeds and how well they have performed.

First of all, I can’t stand people who fill out brackets and you have all four #1 seeds in your Final Four. People got lucky when all four of them did make it to the Final 4 two years ago as that had never happened in history before. As a matter of fact, 3 #1 seeds have made it to the Final 4 only three other times since 1979 (1993, 1997 and 1999).

Be careful on making bold predictions for teams making a long run though. Everyone knows a 16-seed has yet to win a game in the tournament but be on the lookout for Lehigh and Vermont teams giving Kansas and Syracuse some trouble before bowing out. I am hopeful that the 1/16 upset happens this year (sans the Duke game) but you never know. Did you know no 14 or 15 seed has won a game in the tournament in the past 3 years, and they have won a combined 3 games in the past decade? You should be comfortable in advancing all the top three seeds without much hesitation.

Teams seeded 13th or lower in the NCAA tournament have been first-round “giant killers” 41 times since the field was expanded to 64 teams. Of those surprises, 30 have been decided by fewer than 6 points or in overtime. So if you feel confident about Siena or Murray State, go for it and take that chance.

The dreaded 5/12 upset seems to happen every year. Only twice in the past 20 years (2000 and 2007) has there not been a 12-seed advancing at least into the second round but the furthest a 12-seed has made it is the Elite 8. The only double digit seeds to make it to the Final 4 are LSU (’86) and George Mason (’06) who were both 11-seeds.

The 8/9 games are statistically a toss-up. Since 1985, the 8-seed has won 46 times but has lost 54 times but over the course of the tournament, the 8-seed is 66-99 while the 9th seed are 58-100.

When determining teams for your Final 4, you’re safe to have team that are seeded 5th or higher. In the past decade, only 3 teams seeded 6th or lower have made the Final 4 and it has only happened in 2 years (2000, 2006).

No seed ranked 9th or lower has ever won the Championship. No 5th or 7th seed has ever won a Championship but they have made it to the Title Game 3 times (1984, 2000 and 2002). Unlikely champions are a 4th seed (once – 1997), 6th seed (twice – 1983, 1988) and 8th seed (once – 1985).

Let me know who you have in your Final 4 and your eventual champions. What kind of upsets are you expecting? Do you believe that Purdue will really be that bad and lose to Siena? Which #1-seed goes down first?

My answers: expecting two 5/12 upsets a couple of 10 and 11 seeds winning. Think Purdue will keep the game close but Siena will win it in the end. First #1 seed to go down will be Kentucky because of their youth and inexperience.

Look at the picture:

Watch the clip:

Get your own food.

[Edit] Problem solved, using a SumIF ended up fixing both of my problems. Thanks to Mr. Feraudo. [/Edit]

For you Microsoft Excel experts out there, I have data on the scoring for an individual player and I am trying to figure out the use of a formula or two to calculate the following: I need to calculate the number of goals a person scored at Home (or Away) without individually counting them and then do the same thing for games in which the player’s team Won or Loss.

I thought about using CountIf but I’m not sure how to count items from a range of data based on a criteria that is not necessarily in the range. For example, if I want to count items from the Goals column based upon whether the Location is Home or not. Also, I’m not too familiar with using the Offset formula to calculate a column’s worth of data in a single cell as opposed to repeat it for every cell.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Even if you think you have something that might work but you aren’t too sure, feel free to shoot me an email or talk to me online about it.

Earlier this week, the Stevens Athletics Department launched its own YouTube channel. It is a pretty good way to share views of the coaches, student-athletes and even some game footage from the games that take place. I think they have done a pretty good job adapting the change in social media by connecting with fans through Twitter, Facebook and now YouTube.

The first interview was conducted by Rob (our Sports Information Director) which was done two days ago with the Head Baseball Coach John Crane and the second one, which is embedded below, is my first one with Head Women’s Lacrosse Coach Celine Cunningham.

There are going to be more of these as the semester progresses and selfishly, it is quite unfortunate this is all starting in my last semester. However, comparing it to how things were when I first started school here — the change has been awesome.

Blame the darkness of the video on a gloomy, rainy day in Hoboken but I thought the interview went beautifully and Celine is always a pleasure to talk to, both on and off the record. She’s a huge Maryland fan and she took some Duke jabs at me before the interview so I’m homing Coach K and company take care of business in the ACC.

While watching this video, please be critical towards me — as critical as you can get, as I want to use this to improve my own techniques like I definitely should have had a straighter posture and maybe applied a couple of follow up questions. What else do you suggest?

To view this video at the Stevens YouTube Channel, click here.