Final Four 2014 Prediction Roundup: With Busted Brackets, Experts Make Do-Over Nat'l Title Picks
ByNow that even some of the most visible college basketball experts' brackets are busted, they have released their revised national title picks, now that the field is down to four.
With the Final Four set to start Saturday, less than one percent of the millions of fans who submitted brackets online predicted Florida, UConn, Wisconsin and Kentucky would be the last teams standing. Experts at CBS Sports, ESPN and Sports Illustrated have not been immune.
At ESPN, Jay Williams, Jay Bilas and Dick Vitale all picked Michigan State to bring home the National Championship, but are now split. Williams chose UConn to play Wisconsin for the title while Bilas and Vitale each chose Florida to meet Kentucky in the final game.
Andy Katz and Eamonn Brennan each chose Florida to beat Wisconsin in the for the national title and, rounding out the ESPN team, Myron Medcalf picked Florida to beat Kentucky.
CBS Sports' Gary Parrish is one of many who does not have a single team from his original bracket prediction in the Final Four. He has taken his second chance to chose Florida to beat Kentucky.
"I usually have a pretty good idea, or at least I usually think I have a pretty good idea, about who will and will not win the national championship by the time we get to the Final Four," he wrote in a column published Thursday. "More specifically, I think I can usually identify the team or two that probably has no shot, for a variety of reasons. And yet this year I'm basically stuck.
"For the record, I'm picking Florida."
At Sports Illustrated, Seth Davis, Luke Winn, Pete Thamel, Brian Hamilton and Greg Bishop agreed on Florida beating UConn. Davis, Hamilton and Bishop all picked Kentucky in the second game, while Winn and Thamel went with Wisconsin. Bishop chose Kentucky to win the title game and was the only one not to choose Florida.
Nate Silver, the statistical analysis guru behind FiveThirtyEight.com, found Florida to have a 38 percent chance of winning it all, followed by Wisconsin at 31 percent, Kentucky at 19 percent and UConn at 11 percent.