Thursday, March 15, 2001                         http://www.HWCI.com/ncaa
Issue # 3.1.1 "Hampton In(n)!..."

2001 HWCI NCAA TOURNAMENT POOL
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LA MIRADA, CA (smt)- Where do you start? Whereas #15E-Holy Cross, #14W-George Mason, and #14E-Southern Utah came oh, so close to netting the huge upsets, #15W-Hampton, #13W-Kent St., and #12E-Utah St. did knock off their higher seeded foes. In addition, #11W-Georgia St., #10W-Georgetown, and both #9 seeds won. #1E-Duke, #1W-Stanford, #5W-Cincy, and #6E-USC won in blowouts while #4E-UCLA and #7E-Iowa pulled away late.

All in all, 9 of the 16 games were decided by four or less points and one additional game went to overtime. There was a buzzer beater win by Georgetown with almost no buzzer! The buzzer broke at halftime but was fixed late in the second half. The refs still had to review the play on TV, though (it counted). #8E-Georgia rallied from 11 down with less four minutes to go before losing to #9E-Missouri. In fact, the "Georg"'s went 2-3 today (Win-Georgia St, Georgetown; Loss-Georgia, #8W-Georgia Tech, George Mason). #2W-Iowa St. becomes just the fourth #2 seed to be knocked off in the first round since the 64 (er, now 65) team tournament began in 1985. The mighty Big 10 conference teams went 1-3 (all higher seeds).

I didn't watch one smidgin of live basketball on TV but did listen to several games and followed the scores on the internet. Tomorrow I should get my fill of TV games.

Well, I guess the stock market downturn has turned people to try to win money by gambling (wait, playing the stocks is gambling... sorry) as we have a received a record 59 entries. This is still unofficial and the sooner we receive payments from all involved, the more concrete the entries will be. With 59 people, we are looking at a $590 pot and a $275 first-place prize. We'll have everything finalized by next week. Please check your information (www.hwci.com/ncaa/picks.html) for accuracy. Also, some of your nicknames may have been slightly changed. A full report later, but now: Who's winning?

LIL PQ and ZERV THE GREEK lead the pack with 28 and 26 points (14 and 13 correct) while UCLA SUCKS! (to every die hard Bruin fan's delight) sits in the cellar with 14 points (tying a record for worst 1st day performance). But things can change quickly. DECEMBER (17th-T, 20 pt) will need some big help as two of her Final Four teams have been eliminated (Ohio St., Indiana). There are 37 entries with 20 or 22 points. Whereas last year 29 of 36 had 26 or more points on the first day, this year only 2 of 59 did.