Once More Unto The Breach... of March Madness

Love seeing this back! Hoping things are going well for you!

Wow, this was cool:


Huge upset and the 100% rating - nice 🏆




Yeah, I can definitely appreciate that. 


Hope you are having fun with this new format so far. It sounds like you are! 😄

The Sweet 16 is now complete and it is time to survey the damage.

West region






The big news of not only the region but perhaps the entire round was the fall of Gonzaga/Inoki. They were not only the tourney's overall #1 seed but by advanced stats they were markedly above even the next best team. To put in Fire Pro terms, they were represented by a 267 point edit; the next highest of the 64 included wrestlers was 231 (the lowest was 42 if you want to know what the "zero" score is). Fire Pro had them winning and they did not... but I am okay with this. I am because the two people I really want to beat both had Gonzaga/Inoki winning the entire thing which means their loss lowers their possible max score by about 600 points. At worst this bracket suffers the same fate, but if not it could potentially help us tremendously.



Fortunately out other pick in the region went perfectly as we had both Andre/Duke and Cena/Texas tech making it to this game, and Andre/Duke winning it. Much like the actual game itself it was close and competitive throughout with Cena managing to both AA Andre and lock him in the STF (brief digression: Andre/Cena would have likely ruled in real life) but Andre's sheer mass eventually proved to be too much.

Still in play:
2. Andre - Duke

East region






Well there's no good way to sugar coat this one, this was a disaster. We had both #4 Mutoh/UCLA and #3 Baba/Purdue in this round and picked to win against sizable underdogs #8 North Carolina and #15 St. Peters (would have been represented by Taijiri and Mr. Pogo respectively), yet both underdogs pulled it off somehow. Amazingly this includes a #15 seed making the Elite 8 which has literally never happened before in either real life or any of my Fire Pro sims, basically it is so unbelievable of a storyline that not even a wrestling video game would believe it. We're dead in this region now after being positioned wonderfully, but at least it was in service of such a tale.

Anyways, here is what Fire Pro had predicted for the future...



Obviously it came down to Mutoh and Baba with Mutoh just teeing off on Baba's spindly legs. Clearly the plan was the chop down the giant in order the set him up for a shining wizard or moonsault, but ultimately Baba proved to be too much and stunned Mutoh with a big dropkick just long enough to catch him with a sudden 3 count (so sudden there wasn't a screenshot taken). #3 Baba/Purdue would have made the final 4 if not for all those darn cinderellas.

Still in play: none


South region: Dead


Midwest region






Surprise, we were done here before this round even started. We only had Bruno Sammartino/Kansas left in play in this region and we had them losing this round (in real life they won) so there was no real path forward. I could have spoiled that last week, but where would the fun in that have been?

Anyways with our third (*gulp*) region dead let's once more look at the future we didn't have.



Fire Pro predicted a battle of relatively low seeds with #5 Kane/Iowa against #7 Okabayashi/USC, or as I like to call it big men slappin' meat. Not a lot of technique, whole bunch of clubberin' and tossing each other around ended up with a cinderella pick of #7 Okabayashi moving on to the final 4.

Still in play: none

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Well it is time to state the obvious: all of our hopes and dreams come down to a single wrestler/team as we've only got one of the final eight picked right. That seems bad, and it isn't great, but there are silver linings here.

First off Fire Pro did accurately pick three of the four 1 seeds being eliminated by this point which is a point in its favor in terms of predictive ability and a sign that many other brackets are also in shaky condition. It also predicted two fairly chalk regions and two fairly chaotic ones which is relatively close to what has taken place, although in a rare twist real life went with more major upsets than the game. Ultimately though what it comes down to is that while we only have one pick left... it's Andre the fucking Giant. If you gotta go all in on someone go with the giant!

Elite Eight time, with only one region we have to worry about anymore.

West region




Unfortunately while in real life #2 Duke got to face a more manageable #4 Arkansas Fire Pro had #2 Andre the Giant have to face off with the dominant overall #1 seed Inoki. A giant is always a problem to deal with but few edits in the game are as potentially dangerous and hit quite as hard as Inoki, who hit his kicks and took apart the Andre's legs until...




...he got his ass beat! Andre and Duke advance... but is that what Fire Pro predicted?


Final Four 




We are still alive with only two rounds left! These are the big point rounds with the semis worth 160 points and a finals win worth 320, and looking at the rest of the group I am primarily competing against (i.e. my two buds) all of us only have 1 team left alive. Let me post an updated "real life" bracket:



They both have Kansas left... but neither of them picked Kansas to win the championship (both had the aforementioned Gonzaga/Inoki). They are both ahead of me, but not by 160 points. If Kansas loses they lose every remaining possible point, the same being true for Andre, Duke and I. Kansas is legit as hell (they were represented by Bruno Sammartino) but we are close to the end game now and exactly where we wanted to be. Next Saturday could see us end up locked in last or secure first... or perhaps even see things drawn all the way to the actual championship game with literally everything on the line. No pressure.

Previously in this topic...



The Final Four




...Last it is.




In retrospect perhaps Fire Pro should have realized that making multiple giants work five matches in a single day tourney was a bad idea. While they did successfully predict Duke/Andre making it this far, and did have them winning this matchup, in reality they simply ran out of gas and lost a close matchup to a non-giant who had a bit more left in the tank. A good run was had, but unfortunately things came up just a bit short.

You know what the bothersome part was though?








Fire Pro actually had Andre/Duke winning the whole thing, so we had a full 480 points still in play coming into this round. That means not only could we have won our group, but we had a chance to put up a legit very respectable score beyond that. It's a bittersweet what if, but we were competitive up to the very end.

---

So time to take a final look back at how we did.




While the final game is still left to play assuming North Carolina doesn't pull off a sizable upset my brackets percentile performance should remain about the same (and if that upset does occur it should only knock it down a bit). 440 isn't a particularly great score but being at 27.7 percent means that Fire Pro picked a bracket that beat one out of every four submitted to ESPN. To be fair a lot of brackets were picked at random or not completed or by other various insane ways but even all that considered... a good number of people nationwide picked an honest bracket and got beat by a wrestling video game. Taking a quick peak at other brackets a win this round would have put us a bit over 50% and a win in the finals probably would have put us I'd guess at least at 70%. Fire Pro flirted with doing some real damage this year.

On a more micro level performance two regions (south and midwest) were pretty much a disaster but the other two were picked legit very well. In the West we picked the winner correctly and were generally fairly accurate in our results, and in the East it took a pair of massive upsets almost no one anywhere predicted to prevent us from having the elite eight match-up picked perfectly. Literally no bracket anywhere is ever picked perfectly and is always haunted by some what ifs, but I think this ended up being a credible bracket and so even though it ended in defeat I say that FPW did a rather respectable job. Kudos to Fire Pro!


...I'd seriously like to win one of these sometime though :\

In the sake of transparency I checked what my bracket's percentile performance was after the championship game (what a choke job BTW >_> ) and it stayed exactly the same at 27.7.

Since I have some slight access to final numbers now a score of 710 finished in the 82.3 percentile, and that was with a tourney favorite winning; if Duke/Andre held on in the semis and won the whole thing my bracket score I believe would have been 920. It didn't happen but given how they lead most of the semis until the very end and how much of a collapse it took for Kansas to actually win... we were legit a couple plays away from this Fire Pro bracket finishing well in the 90+ percentile. If that had happened... man you'd probably have to retire on that great of an outcome.

...So I guess that means I'll see you all again next year