By Brian G. Ricca, Ed.D.

The NCAA Tournament, known as March Madness, is one of the best sporting events in our country. I love college basketball more than its professional counterpart, and this tournament is one of the reasons why. If it were a best-of-five or best-of-seven series, more than likely the better team (on paper) would win. However, this is not a series. Instead, there is a different opponent in every round. If a team wins six games in a row, they are the champion!

As of this past Sunday morning, March 24, my bracket was busted. I picked Kentucky to play Connecticut in the final game. Inexplicably, Kentucky lost to Oakland on Thursday night. That is the joy (for Oakland – a team that few had heard of before that game) and the agony (for Kentucky – a team that hoped to contend for the title) of this tournament. By the way, Oakland lost its second game to North Carolina State and is also out of the tournament. 

There is no such thing as a perfect bracket. OK, it’s not that there’s no such thing. It’s nearly impossible to pick all 63 games correctly. The odds of picking that flawless bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Essentially, it’s the equivalent of me picking up one grain of sand and you guessing the exact grain of sand I picked.

This week, I listened to a podcast about the 2019 NCAA Tournament and a gentleman named Dr. Gregg Nigl, a neuropsychologist for Veterans Affairs from Columbus, Ohio. Like many of us, Nigl filled out a couple of brackets that year without any specific pattern. As a Big Ten fan, he leaned heavily on the teams he knew from that conference and ended up throwing in some upsets along the way, like we all do. 

When the tournament began, he and his family were driving to Vermont for a ski vacation. During their drive, they stopped along the way to eat and watch some basketball. It was a long drive, so by the time they arrived on Sunday, Dr. Nigl and his family were happy to be at their destination. 

When they woke up on Monday, Dr. Nigl was surprised by a voicemail that he got from a colleague. Someone from the NCAA was calling his office looking for him. It turned out that as of Monday morning, after the first four days of the tournament, Dr. Nigl had picked a perfect bracket. There were 48 games played from Thursday through Sunday. Dr. Nigl picked every single one of them correctly. Yes, you read that correctly. Every game from Thursday afternoon to Sunday night, all 48 games, were accurate on his bracket. 

This was his 15 minutes of fame. Buick (a sponsor that year) wanted to fly him out to Anaheim, Calif, to see his beloved Michigan Wolverines play in the Sweet Sixteen (the second weekend of the tournament). He was on CNN and Good Morning America. This perfect bracket took over his family’s time in the Green Mountain State. 

In Anaheim with his son (Nigl could only take one other person with him), as he got to the arena to watch the game, he found out that the University of Virginia came back and beat Oregon, another pick he had. Forty-nine correct picks out of a possible sixty-three! But before the game started, he saw that one of his picks was in trouble. From his seat in the arena, he watched on his phone, Tennessee lost to Purdue, and his streak of accuracy was over. 

It only went downhill from there. He watched, in person, as Michigan lost to Texas Tech, and in the second game that weekend, he watched Texas Tech take out his Championship pick: Gonzaga. For the remainder of his bracket, Dr. Nigl missed on three of his eight Sweet Sixteen picks. Only one of his Final Four picks actually made it to the last weekend. All in all, he accurately picked 53/63 games in the 2019 tournament. 

This is the fifth anniversary of that fantastic string of predictions. In the podcast, Nigl shared that he and his son were talking about the trip. When his son was asked, “What was your favorite memory of the trip?” His son said, “Happy to be in a cool place with you.” 

Not being at a college basketball game in Anaheim. Not his dad being on TV multiple times. Not the hotel, the rental car, the spending money from Buick. Not his dad’s 15 minutes of fame. Being with his dad was the best part of that streak of 49 correct NCAA game outcomes. 

As parents, from the moment our children are born, we raise them to be independent beings. We celebrate all the milestones: crawling, walking, riding a bike, and driving a car. All those events are attempts for our children to grow from us. Time slips through our fingers as consistently as the seasons change. That is the gift of parenthood: time. 

For My Wife and me, we have crested over the halfway point. This year, Our Boys will turn 16 and 18 and have already had the majority of time in our home that they will spend. Our weekends are often spent in different locations, watching different sports, at different times, texting each other updates from games. Vacations to us have always been precious, but even more so as Our Boys have gotten older. We crave that unscripted time with them, away from the schedules, classes, homework, and jobs. 

What we do in education is essential; it’s critical work. The shaping of young minds, especially in 2024, requires preparation, care, and a growth mindset. It takes a district and community beyond who we see in the classrooms to get it done. Yet, the work of our families and the time with our families come first. 

“I picked the best bracket ever, and it was very lucky. But it might have been the second luckiest thing that happened to me that March.” – Dr. Gregg Nigl 

P.S. Thank you to my dear friend Mike Philbrick and the team at ESPN Daily for reporting this story. 

Brian G. Ricca, Ed.D., is the superintendent of East Greenwich Public Schools.