Mitt Romney in Top 1 Percent of March Madness Pool
The heavily favored Kentucky Wildcats’ loss to the Wisconsin Badgers during Saturday night’s Final Four game resulted in most of the nation tearing up their NCAA March Madness brackets. However, Mitt Romney, no stranger to being in the top 1 percent, now finds himself in an even more exclusive club after picking both Duke and Wisconsin to meet in the NCAA Finals: The top .02 percent of the 11.57 million people who filled out Tournament Challenge brackets on ESPN.com.
According to the Huffington Post, the suddenly likable former Republican presidential candidate currently sits in 25,485th place in ESPN’s standings. There’s no scenario in which Romney can actually win the Tournament Challenge, but he does reside in the 99.98 percentile. By comparison, Romney’s 2012 sparring partner, President Barack Obama, is all the way down in 6,918,578th place, the 40th percentile, which means people picking teams at random are likely faring better than the basketball-loving president.
In 2012, after Romney announced that he would pursue the Republican nomination, the Massachusetts governor declined to fill out a bracket for that year’s March Madness, citing that he was “not plugged in well enough this year to do that.” It’s unclear whether watching college basketball has consumed his time since declining a 2016 presidential bid, but Romney correctly guessed six of the Elite Eight teams, with only Kansas and Iowa State ruining his Tournament Challenge entry (though to be fair, Iowa State screwed over millions of brackets).
As for Monday night’s finals, Romney guessed that Jahlil Okafor would lead Coach K’s Blue Devils to victory over the Badgers. However, Romney failed to predict the final score of the game, so he’ll lose the tiebreaker to more than a few one-percenters if Duke does end up winning.