By Brendan Loy
[Sorry for the delay in getting this full update online. I blame fatherhood!]
Matt Wiser clinched victory in the 15th annual Living Room Times men’s NCAA pool Saturday night when Duke beat West Virginia in the second national semifinal.
The Duke-WVU game was a winner-take-all LRT pool showdown between Wiser and Sharon Greggs. If the Mountaineers had won, Greggs, a Mary Kay beauty consultant in Roanoke, VA and a 1988 New River Community College grad, would have taken the lead and clinched the pool championship. Instead, Wiser, an LSU graduate student, 2002 University of Rochester alum and native of Kenmore, NY, extended the lead that he took when Michigan State reached the Final Four, making it impossible for anyone to catch him.
The highest-ranked contestant who can still gain points is Matt’s brother, Brendan Loy’s USC classmate and longtime blog regular Mike Wiser, who is currently in eighth place, 44 points behind his brother. Mike Wiser picked Duke to win the championship, and if they do, he’ll gain 25 points and tie Julia Hauser for second place, creating a 1-2 finish for the Wiser brothers. (If Butler wins, the current standings will be frozen in place, since nobody in the pool picked the Bulldogs to win it all.)
Matt Wiser has a 46-16 prediction record, three games better than his closest competitors, Hauser and Greggs. He picked Michigan State to reach the Final Four, which only three others predicted, and Duke to reach the title game, which 44 out of 182 contestants picked (Kentucky was the far more common choice). Out of a possible 452 points, Wiser has 314.
Hauser has 295 points for second place, Greggs has 287, Ryan Dalidowitz 283, and Jessica Cowans 280. Mike Marchand is sixth with 278 points, Casey Zak has 272, Mike Wiser 270, Logan Pugh 268, and Carol LaPlante and Andrew Leyden are tied for tenth with 266 points. Again, complete standings here.
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April 5th, 2010 at 12:54 pm Mountain Time
LOL. I’m tied with Loyette. The funniest thing is she probably knows more about college basketball than I do!
April 5th, 2010 at 1:04 pm Mountain Time
Ha! I honestly hadn’t looked far enough down the standings to notice that I’m 12th and Loyette is 17th. Awesome. Also, I BEAT ANDREW BY ONE POINT muahahahahaha
April 5th, 2010 at 1:06 pm Mountain Time
Excuse me, Andrew can still gain 25 points, finish 5th in the pool, and beat me by 24, if Duke wins the title. I was looking at the Butler-wins “what-if” scenario. D’oh. Now I probably jinxed it.
April 6th, 2010 at 6:11 am Mountain Time
Due to life the universe and everything, I did not watch a single second of college basketball this year. Not one. In fact, I was kind of in shock when the tourney started as it seemed that basketball hadn’t taken place this year.
However, fwiw, this was my absolute BEST year in the LRT brackets EVER! I finished 1 point ahead of Brendan in #15 overall, where usually I take my time and plot my choices so meticulously that I end up in the bottom third year in and year out.
Ignorance is bliss I guess.
April 24th, 2010 at 7:22 pm Mountain Time
[...] Matt Wiser wins LRT men’s pool [...]
April 25th, 2010 at 4:11 am Mountain Time
[...] Matt Wiser wins LRT men’s pool [...]
July 6th, 2010 at 7:26 am Mountain Time
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