1.
Forget the office pool.
The stakes for filling out an NCAA tournament bracket involve some real money this year.
Like $1 billion dollars.
Warren Buffet and Quicken Loans are teaming to award $1 billion to anyone who picks the entire tournament bracket correctly.
But don’t start shopping for private islands yet. You won’t win.
ESPN has run a bracket contest for 13 years and nobody has come close to acing it. If you filled out one bracket per second, it would take 292 billion years to cover every possible outcome.
2.
Sunday offered a rare Portland sports triple-header for anyone with a bit of stamina and a high tolerance.
At 7:40 a.m., the starting gun sounded for the first of 30,000 Shamrock Run participants on the waterfront. By 9:30 a.m., many were drinking free beer.
At noon, the Portland Timbers played up the road at Providence Park. More beer there, certainly.
At 6 p.m., the hardiest fans could have been at the Moda Center to watch the Blazers.
We hope they chose to drink water.
3.
A new chapter in Portland professional sports opens today with the Portland Thunder’s inaugural game in the Arena Football League.
Portland’s last AFL team, the Forest Dragons, played here from 1997-99, averaging 8,914 fans a game before moving to Oklahoma.
With an aggressive advertising campaign, the Thunder are trying to make a splash. But gaining a foothold in a sports market is never easy.
Are the Thunder here to stay or a flash in the Northwest sky? We’ll get our first clues tonight.
