March Madness Mulligan: redoing picks for Sweet Sixteen

Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

Thanks to a volatile and highly unpredictable yet immensely entertaining first weekend of the 2014 NCAA Tournament, it’s likely that your bracket has gone up in smoke. Literally, some of you may have lit them on fire. And going against protocol, I am going to discuss the picks made by yours truly. I enjoy (but am terrible at) golf, so to use a golf term, I’m going to take a mulligan and redo my bracket (where applicable, after all, I’m 4-for-4 in East Region Sweet Sixteen participants).

We’ve reached the Sweet Sixteen and there were officially zero perfect brackets remaining in Warren Buffet’s “Billion Dollar Bracket” contest as the final three remaining contestants picked George Washington to beat Memphis in the second round. The Tigers won, 71-66.

As for the writers at Busting Brackets, we have a free and friendly competition going for March Madness between the lot of us, of which I have no chance of winning thanks for a certain school (Duke) bowing out to the Mercer Bears. To ease the pain, two of the other seven participants are out as well, as one picked the Wichita State Shockers while the another chose Kansas Jayhawks, both logical choices. I was hoping to catch lightning in a bottle in hopes of Jabari Parker being able to do what Carmelo Anthony did as a freshman for the Syracuse Orange in 2003.

Here’s what the actual bracket looks like so far.

I’ll briefly give my picks and reasoning before discussing who is actually left and who my mulligan picks are to reach the Elite Eight.