Another installation of March Madness is in the books, and with it, the cessation of social media posts about your friends’ brackets “being totally destroyed!!!!” as though they alone picked the #1 seed instead of the #16 seed and thus their bracket carnage was unique. Ted from HR, who is a total jerk, won the office pool again, super annoyingly, and is still crowing about it days later. Worst of all, we’re now in the doldrums of sports, leaving you with nothing to do except watch Twitter for snippets of speculation out of spring football practice. Or watch baseball. It’s debatable which is worse. We don’t even have Sister Jean to guide us any longer.

At least it was a fun tournament. #1 UVA was beaten historically, and the world got to meet UMBC’s excellent Athletic Department Twitter account, and also got to learn where UMBC is. #16 over #1 is no longer an impossibility. There were upsets galore. A 98-year-old retired nun became a sports celebrity. If you weren’t personally invested in this tournament, it was a really fun one.

Anyway, we’d like to thank all of you who participated in the OTE Bracket Pool! We had 76 people participate, and 75 of you were terrible.

Winners

Congratulations to Chad M, whose bracket “Jay is soooo Wright!” carried the day with 124 points, and the decision to put both Michigan and Villanova in the final. CJ with “CJ’s Cool Bracket” placed second with 118 points. Both of you are entitled to write a featured article for OTE on a sports-related topic of your choosing, should you wish to do so.

Losers

Since you obviously come here for the wealth of insightful sports know-how exhibited by the “writers,” you’re probably wondering how we did. As usual, not very well.

#4 - Graham Filler: Picking the blue side of the reversible UM-MSU jacket paid big dividends this year

#9 - BRT: Knowing literally nothing about non-B1G basketball turned out not to matter much

#18 - Boilerman31: One of our main basketball writers took a chance on Kansas. Didn’t work.

#19 - Candystripes: In retrospect, picking UVA to win it all was ill-advised

#22 - Stew: Stew’s patented system of crapshooting with numbers had mediocre results

#27 - Creighton: Another Iowa writer hanging out toward the middle of the pack. Fitting.

#28 - MNW: Much like Northwestern basketball, this was not THE YEAR for MNW

#30 - MCClapYoHandz: As he put it, a “gentleman’s 30th.” Sure.

#51 - DeadRead: Ooof. Bit of a drop-off, wasn’t that? The Spartans did you in.

#59 - Beez: Mirroring his team’s season, kind of a total failure here.

Once again, thanks for playing along, and for reading OTE!

https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/t1/group/111798/standings?