The hopes of many people hoping to win Warren Buffett's $1 billion prize for a perfect NCAA bracket were demolished Thursday in the first full day of the annual March Madness tournament — and Dayton is primarily to blame.
After Game 1 of the tournament, Dayton's win over Ohio State
decimated a whopping 81 percent of all brackets on CBSSports.com, according to the site. After Game 4, only 5 percent of brackets remained.
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The Boston Globe points to three "upsets" in the first four games — Dayton, Harvard, and North Dakota State — as the culprits of the unusually turbulent Day 1. The Globe's John Marshall wrote that "at least 95 percent" of brackets were sent to the garbage bin "before the tournament was 12 hours old."
"Being bounced from the billion THAT early definitely made me feel some type of way," Marcus Arman of Portland, Ore., told the Globe. "I can tell you this: I will not be supporting the city of Dayton in any shape, form, or fashion so long as my foam finger still points upward."
As Friday's games come to an end, less than 0.2 percent of brackets remain among the tens of millions that people registered across the Internet. It's statistically possible that not a single person will go 32 for 32. Some might even say likely.
Perhaps Buffett knew exactly what he was doing when he put up that billion that might sit untouched this year.
Former Harvard and current Houston Rockets guard Jeremy Lin took to Twitter to mock all those who doubted his alma matter, gleefully rubbing salt into millions of wounds. "Yesssssssssss HARVARD!!!!!!! Messing up a lot of people's chances at $1 billion lol."
After Game 1, Mayhem (the character from the Allstate Insurance ads), also posted a Vine video to Twitter demonstrating, metaphorically, what just happened to everyone's brackets:
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