2023 NCAA Tournament Alternative Contest

[500 wrestler]

I got the idea for this contest from the Dark Horse thread. I then came up with a couple of other questions and built a google form and a scoring system around this: https://forms.gle/qNWvZgZrFYiUrct69

There are three parts of this competition; you select a wrestler for each weight. Here are the three parts:

1. AA Overachievers: Select wrestlers that you think will AA and outperform their seed. Points awarded = seed - AA placement. Valid values 2-32. No points awarded if wrestler does not AA.
2. Non-AA Underachievers: Pick top 8 seeded wrestlers that you don't think will AA. Points awarded = 9 - seed. Valid values 1-8. No points awarded if wrestler AAs.
3. First Round Upset: Pick a first round upset. Points awarded = seed - 16. Valid values 17-32 (pigtail matches ignored). No points awarded if wrestler loses first round match.

To provide real-life examples, these would have been the highest individual scorers across all weight last year:

1. AA Overachiever: 197 Gavin Hoffman, 21 seed/6^th place = 15 points.
2. Non-AA Underachiever: 141 Jayden Eierman, 2 seed = 7 points.
3. First Round Upset: 174 Tyler Eischens, 26 seed= 10 points.

Remember the objective here is not pick the highest scorer at each weight but rather to maximize your total points. For example, for AA Overachiever you may think a 7 for a particular weight is likely the make the finals, which would earn you 5 or 6 points. Whereas picking a 25 seed to AA would be much less likely, although the upside would be higher (17 points if they came in 8^th). So it come down to risk/reward.

A few more notes:

1.  I am asking for your email, but this is only so that you can get your responses emailed to you which also gives you the opportunity to change your picks right until the tournament starts. If you don’t’ want to provide your email just put in a dummy email.
2. I am asking for your forum member name so I can announce the winners. But this can be filled out by someone who doesn't have a member name, they would just need to enter a name for this contest.
3. Rather than selecting wrestlers by name you have to select by seed at each weight. This saved me a lot of time in building the form and will make it easy to compile results.

I hope some of you enjoy this. I don’t know if I will get zero of you to fill it out, or 10, or more. But it only took me about an hour to build and I think it will kind of fun and give some additional things to root for.

[DiverDownBrian]

In

[500 wrestler]

Reminder to consider this conteet: https://forms.gle/qNWvZgZrFYiUrct69. I have made a change so that you can now enter 1, 2, or all 3 contests.

With bracket change at 133 and 149 (I think), hopefully all who have entered have saved a link to update their brackets. If not, lmk and I'll email you with a personalized link. Or based on time stamp of your entry I can adjust picks accordingly based on final brackets. 

Thought I'd share my thoughts on on of my AA overachiever picks:  At 197, for me it was between Dean (9 seed) or Warner (15 seed). Both are 3 time AAs (Dean 7, 2, 1; Warner 7,4,2 I think). Warner has more potential return because he is a bit lower seed, but he has looked off this year. And honestly I can't see Dean not placing top 8, and I could easily see him in the 1-4 range.  So for me, safe money goes on Dean.

For high seed overachiever, at 125 Poulin and Smith seem like high seeds that could easily finish off of the podium. Others who have entered seem to agree.