NCAA Tournament Bracket Challenge - Round 1, day 1 Update

March Madness is officially here.  And with it, the return of the Bucket Squad Sports Reports Mega March Madness Matchup Monstrosity for the fourth consecutive year.  And the field for our bracket challenge is the biggest its ever been as BSSR's reach has exploded across the internet and the country.

Before we get into the BSSRMMMMM leaderboard, I'll give a quick breakdown of yesterday's games.  But if you only care about where you stand in the race for $100, you can scroll to the end.

There wasn't a ton of chaos yesterday, as the better seed won 12 of the 16 matchups throughout the day.  Two of the four upsets involved relatively even matched teams in the 8/9 and 7/10 spots.  The experienced (9) Creighton squad dismantled (8) Louisville in the first game of the day, while (10) Arkansas held off a late comeback from (7) Kansas to get a win in John Calipari's first tournament game with the Razorbacks.

The first big upset of the tournament came in the opening window when (12) McNeese steamrolled (5) Clemson, dominating from the tip and holding the Tigers to just 13 first half points.  This upset proved to have large implications for some of our bracket challenge entrants, as we'll see in a moment.  In the evening window, (11) Drake grabbed a big lead against (6) Missouri and held on to pull off the upset.

Outside of (4) Purdue and (5) Michigan, who struggled a bit but still came out on top, the remaining better seeded teams all cruised to victory.  So along with the teams already mentioned here, congrats to (1) Houston, (1) Auburn, (2) Tennessee, (2) St. John's, (3) Wisconsin, (3) Texas Tech, (4) Texas A&M, (6) BYU, (7) UCLA, and (8) Gonzaga for comfortably securing their spots in the second round.

​Now on to what everyone is waiting to see.  The first Mega March Madness Matchup Monstrosity leaderboard.  We had 25 people sign up this year, which makes this year's challenge our biggest one yet.  There were nine unique champions picked by our applicants this year, which is broken down here:

The loss Clemson suffered took out one champion from our bracket pool.  It also caused damage to two other brackets that had Clemson in the Final Four.  No other brackets lost a single Final Four team through the first day, so the race to $100 remains wide open.

​Here's the leaderboard after Round 1, Day 1:

Enjoy the second day of the opening round of the tournament and check back tomorrow for the updated leaderboard after Round 1 is officially complete.

Written by Nick Swatson