2019 Oracle March Madness trial

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The Virginia Cavaliers were named as the 2019 NCAA champion.

To get in the spirit of March Madness, the Oracle sports section decided to run a few trials for brackets to see which ones would fare the best. The results were sub-par, to say the least. We included trials such as best uniforms, which mascot would win in a fight, win percentages of colors of each team, highest seed, and lastly flip a coin between each opponent. While some may be opinionated, we tried our best to pick what we believed were the best candidates for each face off throughout the bracket. To begin, the Sports Writers Poll, collectively decided by the sports section of the Oracle, this bracket ended at a 27.6% accuracy rate, proving we are the experts we like to pretend to be with North Carolina as our champions. Secondly, we had the mascot bracket based off of which mascot would most likely win in a setting of a basketball court, sadly out champion The Iowa State Cyclones, were bounced in the first round by the Buckeyes of Ohio State, producing a final percent of 2.6% accuracy. Next was the uniform bracket, where our champion the Oregon Ducks made a respectable run to the sweet 16, before meeting their demise at the hands of the National Champs, leaving our bracket at 7.9%. Flip a coin, a 50-50% chance for each team every game, we drew the short stick with Abilene Christian as our champion, giving us our second to the worse bracket at 4.1%. Here we begin to see the successes of the brackets, the highest seed bracket with Duke as the champ produced an 86.3%, despite the Blue Devils falling in the Elite Eight to Michigan State. Finally, we saved the best for last, the color bracket determining the winner based off of the win percentage of the team’s primary color, if teams shared colors the higher seed was selected. This bracket came out at 92% accuracy, with the Virginia Cavaliers winning in our bracket, which might even be more prestigious than what they were able to accomplish, a National Championship, proving Orange and Blue are the winningest colors in the tourney. While most of the brackets were flat out abysmal, these trial just go to show the difficulty of choosing a perfect bracket, or in our case even an average bracket.