Please click here to see how the Barackets are doing against the nation after Round 2.

After Round 1 of the 2011 NCAA March Madness Tournament, President Barack Obama’s safe “presidential style” Barackets is beating 11,336 of about six million brackets, or about 99.8% of them!

Da Prez is where he is after Round 1 by predicting 28 of 32 correct picks in the round! That’s 3 better than where he was at this point in 2010.

The weakness in the Barackets belonging to the President of the United States (POTUS) came in the East, where he missed 3 of the 4 games he got wrong in Round 2. Fortunately for him, so did the large majority of others because of all the upsets in this round, the #13 Belmont over #4 Louisville and #11 VCU over #6 Georgetown (so convincingly) upsets were, arguable, the most surprising. He also got the fairly evenly matched #8 UNLV beaten by #9 Illinois wrong, for which he should be ashamed being from Illinois!

Fortunately for the POTUS, he didn’t pick any of his upsetted teams to go very far. Only his pick for Louisville was slated to have one more win. And good for da Prez that he also picked the other upsets while avoiding picking popular upset candidates among the favourites.

So while all looks spectacular for da Prez after Round 1, I caution too much optimism yet. It’s not that I don’t like da Prez, but that the ESPN scoring system rewards much bigger points for future games with the same potential 320 points every single round, but with far fewer games in the upcoming rounds. At this point in the Tournament in 2010, Obama was ahead of 96.5% of about 4.5 million ESPN brackets, with 25 of 32 games correct. However, the POTUS finished ahead of only 51.5% of the 4.5 million brackets when all was said and done.

There’s a lot of ball left to be played, and I’m loving it (da da Da DA da!)

CBS Bracket Challenge Standings

This pool uses a similar scoring to ESPN, at 10% value or 32 points per round. There are far fewer entrants in this pool, though I’m still guessing a couple of million compared to ESPN’s 6 million or so. In the CBS pool, a bracket like that of da Prez is sitting in 865th place overall in the CBS poll after Round 1.

How do I know? I put one in. 😉

I wonder how many others put in a bracket like of the POTUS, though. That’d be interesting to know, eh?

So after Round 1 of the March Madness pool, the POTUS has got his mojo going quite well. I wonder if he’ll be able to convert it to some pojo (political “jo”), where he could definitely use some.

Regardless, I wish him lots of luck… despite the fact he’s beating my brackets sitting way back in the 61.8th percentile at this point with 23 of 32 right. I’m not worried, though. I am 2 and 0 against the POTUS from 2010 and 2009.

Finally, if POTUS is President of the United States, what’s LOTUS? Lord? Luddite? Laggard? 🙂