ALL BRACKETS ARE BUSTED. SOME BRACKETS ARE MORE BUSTED THAN OTHERS.

By the time the field of sixteen had been determined, all of the brackets submitted in the men's tournament had at least one game incorrectly picked, and all but one of those submitted in the women's tournament, where there's still enough by way of inequity that picking the higher seed puts you in a pretty good place to win the office pool.  Thus, the over-under on all the brackets being imperfect by the end of the round of 32 is "Under 48."  (Not to be confused with Proto:48).

That got me thinking, though.  How many of the submitted brackets got the round of sixteen right?  On the men's side, it's Them That Has Gets.  The Sweet 16 invite is for power-conference programs only.  But when I ask the Google search engine "How many bracket contestants correctly identified the round of sixteen?" or variations thereon, I mostly got information about the rarity of "perfect" brackets.  Recall one guy got the first 48 men's games right in 2019, and somebody has done so in the ongoing women's tournament.  The fellow who got the first two rounds bang on did not do so well getting to the round of eight and the title.  So it goes, as America's Newspaper of Record notes.  "Woman Unable To Distinguish Between Basketball And Hockey About To Smoke Your March Madness Bracket Again."

That sort of thinking also permeates the reporting.

After starting the second round with six Yahoo Sports users still undefeated so far in the NCAA tournament, only five brackets were still left standing just two games into play on Saturday.

But after Texas’ upset win over No. 3 Gonzaga, the remaining five were all eliminated in one sweep.

All six users had Michigan rolling into the Sweet 16, something the Wolverines have now done in their past seven NCAA tournament appearances. Michigan, the top seed in the Midwest Region, beat Saint Louis 95-72 to start the day.

Which doesn't answer my question, as it does not tell me, for instance, whether there were contrarians who had Arkansas ousting Wisconsin, Texas ousting Gonzaga, and Michigan and Michigan State both advancing.  Sharp-eyed readers will note an imperfection in there, as High Point ousted Wisconsin, and Arkansas held High Point off down the stretch.

Because of the way most tournament pools reward correct predictions in the final rounds, particularly since the transfer portal and name, image, and likeness payments have become a thing, the way to pick is to take the tragic vision and bet on the side of the power conferences.  And that is why some brackets bust more than others.  If you have Wisconsin making the round of sixteen or Gonzaga making the round of 8, the basketball gods have snipped off a lot of points when the time to divide the money up.

On the other hand, if the continued success of the "high majors" in owning the round of sixteen and thus the finals leads to an expanded field, will that mean a change to the office pool?  In the online pools, and, as far as I know, many of the office pools, players can submit their entries up until the first Thursday tip-off, with the identity of the last four teams in known.  That might have made sense with the initial play-in game format, in which two teams from conferences that in any sane world would face relegation played for the honor of facing a top seed.  In recent years, the tournament organizers have added intrigue to that "first four excused" and "last four paired" stuff that obsesses sports pundits the way Donald Trump's bruises consume political pundits by having an eleven seed at stake.  Thus, for instance, Miami of Ohio, which went unbeaten through the regular season only to lose to Akron in the Mid-American tournament, got to play Southern Methodist for the right to face Tennessee as an eleven, while Akron got Texas Tech as a twelve.  In both such cases, the reality of being a good Mid-American team offset any of that twelve-five or eleven-six upset stuff.  By the time the 64 best basketball programs align into four conferences and dispense with automatic qualifiers and "on the bubble" and all the other stuff, it will come as a relief because the round of sixteen will come from that 64 anyway.  And an imperfect bracket that fills the round of eight with teams from the best among that 64 will beat a bracket that got the first couple rounds mostly right.