Who won our NCAA March Madness Pool?

The Madness is over and the Villanova Wildcats came out on top of the 2015-2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship after an INSANE buzzer-beater ending. This was a wild tournament right off the bat, with lots of big upsets in the first round; most notably with the #2 seed Michigan State Spartans losing to #15 seed Middle Tennessee State. That was an especially big blow to me, since I chose Michigan State as my champion… sigh. However, the biggest March Madness was between Morgan and me and how our brackets stacked up against each other.

Sadly, even though I told you that my alma mater UNC Wilmington was going to upset Duke in the first round, I was wrong. It was really close and UNCW actually took the lead into the second half. It was a very sloppy second half with five players fouling out and Duke edged out an eight point victory. Luckily, they didn’t get much further. Other than that, I did pretty well through the first couple of rounds and ended up correctly picking 7 of the Elite Eight teams. I was feeling pretty good through the first four rounds of the tournament since I was leading Morgan after all of them.

Morgan’s bracket seemed to be whack the entire time. She didn’t score many early points and was looking terrible. I was sure I had this victory. Then I saw she only had 5 Elite Eight teams right and I was pretty stoked. But then I realized that she got the same two teams correct as me in the Final Four (Oklahoma and UNC) but she picked UNC to win the whole thing! Oh crap, she still has her champion alive! The tables turned and even though I had way more points, she had more possible points left than me.

It came down to me winning needing Oklahoma to make the championship and needing UNC not to win, and Morgan needed UNC to win the whole thing to beat me. Well, you know what happened. Oklahoma had literally the worst showing in the history of the Final Four and lost to Villanova by more than 40 points, the worst loss ever in a Final Four game. It all came down to whether the Tar Heels could beat Syracuse. If they did, Morgan would take the lead on my by 10 points and officially claim victory. That proved to be no challenge for them and Morgan won our bracket pool without even needing to see who won the championship.

So with that, I lose and I officially give you this statement as punishment – Morgan is better at sports than me….

She also won her work pool over 12 other people. #GirlPower