Highland Park 10-Year-Old Reminds Us All Why It's Better to Never Fill Out a Bracket

DALLAS - As Michigan and Louisville tipped off in the national title game in Atlanta, 10-year-old Brayden Schager sunk into a couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Watching on an 80-inch screen in a converted garage in Highland Park, he remained calm despite being on the brink of history.

If Michigan won, Schager would have the top ranked bracket out of 8.15 million filled out in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge. He correctly picked 12 of the Sweet Sixteen, seven of the Elite Eight (only missing Duke), all of the Final Four and Louisville and Michigan in the finals.
The bracket was created one night over dinner. Schager called his dad, Scott, who was on vacation in Miami, and asked him for help logging in to ESPN. He filled out 10 brackets on ESPN and had another one with a group of friends.
There wasn’t a prize at stake. ESPN will randomly assign a $10,000 Best Buy gift card to one of the approximately 80,000 people who had brackets in the top one percent. This was simply for pride.
Just before the final buzzer, he took a picture with his first-place bracket. A few short seconds later he dropped from No. 1 to No. 38,292. Disappointed, Schrager walked over to his mom, who wrapped him in a hug.

Just so many validations in this story about why I stopped doing brackets that my only regret is I didn't quit sooner.  If Barbara from Accounts Receivable and her cat aren't scoreboarding the entire office, then there's always some cocky 10-year-old who filled out like 17 different brackets. Guess they're not teaching integrity in schools anymore. And how bout the nerve on this Brayden Schager to say he was guessing, as if we're supposed to believe he had binders of data that ran out after the first nine brackets, so he had to fall back on blind intuition? Hey Nostradamus, if you're so confident then what are you doing using ESPN's Grandma League, where out of over eight million entries, the top prize is a 1 in 80,000 chance for a gift card? Talk about rookie ball. Next time put your piggy bank on the line like a man then we'll talk. I'm sure his allowance is about what WWCD piles up in a week anyway. Oh, and next time, how bout you wait until after the game to celebrate. At the end of the day you didn't even crack the top 38,291 and got only a disapproving hug from mom. Choke city, basically.