GRECA WINS POOL AS MARYLAND CAPTURES CHAMPIONSHIP

   Milan Cisar hadn't let go of first place since the second day of the 
tournament. He picked the worst possible moment to slip up.
   Tom Greca overtook Cisar when Maryland won the national championship
game Monday night, and with that, the Central Connecticut State junior
clinched victory in The Living Room Times's seventh annual NCAA men's
basketball pool.
   Greca correctly picked the Terrapins to win it all, whereas Cisar --
who had held at least a share of the lead since the first round -- had 
picked Duke, which lost in the Sweet Sixteen. Cisar therefore needed an 
Indiana win to preserve his lead. 
   It didn't happen. Maryland played an imperfect game, but survived the
underdog Hoosiers' challenge en route to a 64-52 victory.
   Greca finished with 303 out of a possible 477 points, the
second-lowest winning total in "Times" history, but enough to win him
the title and the championship laser pointer in this unpredictable year.
Cisar, a Fordham junior, finished with 295 points.
   The eight-point difference made this the fifth consecutive year that
the men's pool has been won by a single-digit margin. It was the fourth
consecutive year the pool has been decided in the championship game.
   The contrast with the women's pool could hardly be more stark. In
that contest, UConn junior Jenn Castelhano clinched the championship
laser pointer in the Elite Eight, scored a record 409 points and won by
a record 40-point margin of victory. Greca's winning total of 303 points
would have placed him 20th out of 36 contestants in the women's pool.
   But Greca's relatively low winning score and small margin of victory
belie a top-notch performance compared to the rest of the field as a
whole. His "dominance factor," a number that compares the winner's point
total to the average point total of everyone in the pool, shows that
Greca's showing was the second-most dominant in "Times" history --
second only to Castelhano's win this year in the women's pool.
   Greca, who did not compete in the women's pool, was participating in
just his second "Times" pool. (He finished 34th out of 61 in the 1999
men's pool.) No contestant had won a "Times" pool with so little prior
experience since Nathan Emerson won the 1999 men's contest, the first
and only "Times" pool he ever entered.
   Behind Greca and Cisar, USC senior and College Democrats president
David Kirschner finished third with 268 points, breaking his own record
for the best showing by a USC student in a "Times" men's pool. (He
finished fourth last year.)
   No USC student has ever won a "Times" pool, men's or women's. Mike
Wiser came the closest, finishing second in the women's contest last
year. The last eleven "Times" pools have been won by members of the
Class of 1999 from Newington High School in Newington, Connecticut,
where pool administrator Brendan Loy went to school. Both Greca and
Cisar are from that graduating class.
   Providence junior Todd Stigliano, who would have won the pool if
Kansas had beaten Maryland in Saturday's national semifinal, finished
fourth with 265 points. Stigliano, another member of the NHS Class of
1999, won last year's women's pool.
   Union College junior Sara Hamilton, another NHS 1999 graduate, was
fifth with 263 points. St. Mary's School seventh-grader Conor Sullivan
was tied for sixth place with 261 points, alongside Silver Spring,
Maryland resident Rick Boeckler, the uncle of USC junior Rebecca Zak. 
   Ithaca junior Kristy LaPlante, Zak's best friend, finished eighth
with 260 points; USC junior and former Daily Trojan Sports Editor Arash
Markazi scored 256 points to wind up ninth; and Newington High School
freshman Karen Cultrera, who led early in the pool before faltering in
the second round, finished out the Top Ten with 254 points.
   Boeckler, the sixth-place finisher, had quite an odyssey in the pool.
At the end of the first round, he was tied for fourth-to-last -- 43rd
out of 46 contestants -- after suffering an incredible bout of early bad
luck. (He picked almost exactly the right number of first-round upsets,
all of them plausible. He just guessed all the wrong ones.) He had
recovered somewhat, but was only 17th heading into Monday's game. His
faith in the home-state Terrapins completed his comeback, however,
boosting him to the top portion of the leaderboard.
   Boeckler was one of three contestants in the pool with some sort of
Maryland connection. Kevin Wilsey, a graduate student at the university,
also picked the Terps to win the title, and jumped from 30th to 21st
with Monday's result. Josh Rubin, a Maryland senior, did not pick the
Terps -- he had them losing to Kansas in the semifinal -- and finished
tied for 24th place. If he had picked his team to reach and win the
title game, Rubin would have finished in third place.
   Three others picked Maryland to win the title: Boston College junior
Beth Milewski, and the brother-sister team of Karen and Jeff Cultrera.
Karen Cultrera jumped from 20th to 10th with the Terps' win; Milewski
leaped from 21st to 11th place; and Jeff Cultrera, a classmate of
Greca's at Central Connecticut State, went from a 27th-place tie to
19th.
   Defending men's champion Castelhano, who was eliminated from winning
a repeat title when her school's Huskies lost to Maryland in the Elite
Eight, finished tied for 13th place -- her worst showing in the last two
years of "Times" pools, but still impressive in that it was yet another
top-third finish. Castelhano won the 2001 men's pool, finished third in
the 2001 women's pool, and won this year's women's pool.
   USC junior Rosalie Town, who was the last USC student with a
mathematical chance to win this year, finished tied for 15th with 245
points. She was eliminated when Kansas beat Oregon in the Elite Eight.
   Overall, the average total for the tournament's 46 contestants was
217.5 points. Excluding USC junior Jenny Campbell, whose "throw-away"
picks earned her a "risk" rating of 100 percent and a point total of 55,
that average rises to 223.6 points.
   Even with Campbell factored out, the point average was the
second-lowest in Times history. Only in the 2000 men's tournament, when
two #8 seeds reached the Final Four, did pool contestants do worse,
averaging 216 points.


FINAL STANDINGS, SEVENTH ANNUAL MEN'S POOL
* = correctly picked Maryland to win championship

 1. Tom Greca           303*
 2. Milan Cisar         295
 3. David Kirschner     268
 4. Todd Stigliano      265
 5. Sara Hamilton       263
 6. Rick Boeckler       261*
    Conor Sullivan      261
 8. Kristy LaPlante     260
 9. Arash Markazi       256
10. Karen Cultrera      254*
11. Beth Milewski       253*
    Brian Newbold       253
13. Daniel Port         250
    Jenn Castelhano     250
15. Rosalie Town        245
    Colleen Gagne       245
17. Michael Wiser       244
18. Bryan Rudolph       242
19. Jeff Cultrera       241*
20. Ryan McBride        239
21. Kevin Wilsey        236*
22. Suzanne Ogden       231
    Brendan Loy         231
24. Rebecca Zak         228
    Josh Rubin          228
26. Dave Tkacik         225
27. Brian Reagan        224
28. Danny Pilz          220
29. Matt Thomsen        216
30. Scott Loomer        214
31. Kevin Hauschulz     210
32. Mark Graves         206
33. Dave Downes         200
34. Kyle Okita          198
35. Bryan La Rock       189
    Michael Escoto      189
37. Paul Grammatico     188
38. Andrew Long         184
39. Lisa Holl           181
40. Shamar Johnson      158
41. Kat Rickenbacker    157
42. Erin DeRubbo        154
43. Rachel Walker       150
44. Kristy McCray       128
45. Alexis Fleming      113
46. Jenny Campbell       55