7 Interesting Highlights Of The NCAA March Madness 2017

The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament is a single-elimination tournament played each spring in the United States, currently featuring 68 college basketball teams from the Division I level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), to determine the national championship. The first round of the NCAA Tournament was pretty much predictable, but the second round gave us the stunners that we are so used to seeing this time of year and plenty of close games. This year came with plenty of surprises from many teams as well as players. Some teams managed to outshine others while some teams gave us the shock of our lives. By far this season has been the most exciting and most unpredictable of all. Following are some of the crazy and interesting highlights of the NCAA March Madness 2017.

1. Top Overall Seed Villanova, No. 2 Seed Duke & No. 2 Seed Louisville Lost

The season’s most shocking thing that happened during the games was Villanova losing to Wisconsin in their second match. More shocks came later on when No.2 Seed Duke lost to South Carolina in their second match and No. 2 Seed Louisville lost to Michigan in their second round as well. These interesting turn of events damaged plenty of brackets around the globe. All these three teams have been among the top teams who could have won the games. But some pretty sweet matchups await in the Sweet 16 — starting with No. 3 UCLA vs. No. 2 Kentucky in the South. So watch out for more interesting upcoming matches.

2. You Can Watch The Game In VR

You got it right, now you can watch your favorite games in VR. Tech giant Intel is ratcheting up the March Madness for basketball fans, offering an expanded field of games in VR for the men’s NCAA tournament. The deal gives Intel exclusive live VR game rights for the NCAA basketball matches and takes effect with the Sweet 16 round that starts off Thursday night. Intel VR plans to create six live experiences starting with two Sweet 16 round games in San Jose, the Elite 8 game two days later and the Final Four and Championship in Glendale, Ariz. Sounds interesting but it might burn a big hole in your pocket yet it will be a new experience worth having.

3. The Ultimate March Madness Meme

The second round of March Madness Saturday saw something terribly amazing happening on the screen. A distraught Northwestern fan, a young boy was caught sobbing on camera after a questionable second-half foul call. The image was soon dubbed “Crying Northwestern Kid” by the Internet. The boy, who is the son of the Wildcats’ athletic director, according to Chicago Tribune instantly became the new face of NCAA tournament heartbreak. The twitter saw a huge amount of hilarious memes based on the emotional roller coaster of the young boy.

4. A Swarm Intelligence Is Predicting the Future of March Madness 2017

Crazy as it may sound but UNU, the world’s first artificial swarm intelligence, has just been getting better since making a number of remarkably accurate predictions in 2016. This month, UNU has once again proven its prediction capabilities during this season’s March Madness. At the end of Round One of the March Madness basketball tournament, AI’s swarm intelligence-produced bracket has outperformed 99 percent of all ESPN brackets. One of the examples is the AI predicting that the odds of Villanova to win the games is 24% only and Villanova did not even make it to the sweet sixteen.

5. New ESPN Quiz Show — “Bracket Genius.” 

“Bracket Genius” is a new Quiz competition on ESPN which aims to spotlight the academic genius of students at schools participating in March Madness. All the Sweet 16 schools are matched against one another in a bracket-style competition for the chance to have their team crowned the inaugural Bracket Genius Champion and share the prize of $100,000. The final 16 universities represented in the NCAA tournament will match up in the same head-to-head games on “Bracket Genius”. The winning team is decided based on the answering of questions spanning history, geography, politics, literature, science, pop culture, the arts and sports in a race to score as many points as possible against the clock and their opponent.

6. Vanderbilt Fouling Up By 1 In Final Minute

One of the most thrilling games of this season was the match between Vanderbilt and the Northwestern. The competition was neck to neck with each team scoring points consecutively. The final minute proved to be the most thrilling one when the Matthew Fisher-Davis a player of the leading team Vanderbilt managed to foul within the last 15 seconds of the game thus turning it into the favor of Northwestern. McIntosh made both free throws giving Northwestern the go-ahead 67-66 lead. In those final seconds, Vanderbilt didn’t score again. Northwestern added another free throw for the 68-66 win in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

7. Sweet Sixteen and Final Four Predictions

SportsLine expert Stephen Oh correctly predicted eight out of nine NCAA Tournament upsets last year. These included the six out of seven double-digit seed upsets, with his computer algorithm. A week ago, just about everybody assumed that the games were headed for Villanova-Duke in the Elite Eight at Madison Square Garden. But then Wisconsin upset the Wildcats and South Carolina upset the Blue Devils. So now many weird assumptions such as Baylor-Florida are being made. Until now most of the predictions include KU as one of the final four contenders with UCLA and BU as likely final four contenders. According to most of the experts, KU and UCLA both have the talent to win it all, only time will tell who wins the NCAA 2017 games till then stay put for more updates.