2022 March Madness Recap

With the 2022 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament having concluded this past week, I thought I would take this opportunity to share some thoughts about the tournament and lessons I have learned on how to pick the winners going forward.  As I previously shared during last year’s tournament, I fill out a bracket each year with my friend Brian, in which we pick the winners based entirely on who would win a fight between the team’s mascots.  (For example, who would win a fight between a wildcat and a peacock?)  This bracket never actually does well, and this year was no exception.  The rules for how we fill out our bracket can be found on my previous March Madness post from last year.

Before I go any further, I also want to present a riddle for you to figure out.  This is a problem that I used to give my math students back in my teaching days, called the “Big Loser.”  I’ll present the problem here and then give you the solution at the end of this post, as a reward for actually reading the whole thing (or for at least taking the time to skip down to the end).  We know by now that Kansas won this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament.  But who was the “big loser” of the tournament?  For the purpose of this problem, we ignore the extra four teams from the official 68-team field, as we are not counting the four teams that lost in the “play-in” rounds.  (This was so much better back when the tournament was a perfect 64-team field.)  So, out of the final 64 teams, who was the big loser?  It’s one thing to be Texas Southern, lose to Kansas in the first round, and then watch them win the championship.  They can at least say, “We lost in the first round, but the team that beat us won the whole thing, so there’s no shame in that.”  But which team lost in the first round, only for the team that beat them to lose their very next game, to a team who would then lose their next game, and so on, for each round of the tournament?  Only one team has that claim to shame each year.  So, who was it?  Take a moment to figure it out, then keep reading, then I will give the answer at the end.

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