Our Bracket Challenge Came Down to A COIN TOSS!

We run a lot of contests here at the station. And often we catch ourselves thinking up very unlikely scenarios. "What if this happens?" "Well what if THIS happens?" And more than a few times, we've chalked them up to simply "well what are the odds of that happening?"

Well, it happened.

We recently wrapped our annual Million Dollar Bracket Challenge and little did we know that we'd need a THIRD tiebreaker to determine our winner.

If you didn't play along, let me refresh you on the premise of the game: Contestants fill out their college basketball brackets and for each game you get right, you win one point. All games are scored equally, so there's no bonus points for latter games or anything like that. When filling out their bracket, contestants were asked to predict the total number of points scored in the final game. This would be used to break any potential ties...or so we thought.

Coming into the final game, two of our 118 players had 40 points and a third--Amy Legrand--had 39 points. However Amy was the only one of the three with either Villanova or Michigan in the final game (Villanova in this case). So a Villanova win would give us a three-way tie.

As you probably know, Villanova would win that game. And as crazy as things went, both Amy and fellow 40-point-picker Josh Calvin picked EXACTLY THE SAME TIEBREAKER!

What are the odds of that happening?

According to the official rules, we had to break THAT tiebreaker at random, so it came down to a coin toss which Amy won. She was now the proud owner of a kettle grill from Sam's Club.

We were all happy for Amy, but all of us felt really bad for Josh who lost out because a coin landed on heads instead of tails. When we notified the people at Sam's Club of our winner and just how she won, the people at Sam's decided they would just send a second grill our way for Josh.

So thank you Sam's Club for your super nice gesture. Next time you're in there, make sure you tell them thanks for being so generous. They didn't have to do anything, but they came through with flying colors. "What are the odds of that happening?" Thanks Sam's Club!