2019 NCCA Round 1 Recap

The First Round Is in the Books

When we created the 2019 NCCA March Madness tournament, we expected our customers to be interested in the chance to win 100 free coins, we even expected the bracket modeled after the NCAA Basketball Tournament bracket to be a big hit. What we didn’t really expect was the tournament to kick off with as big of a bang as it did. A tepid first round and then progressively more exciting future rounds was more in line with our thinking. 

However, the first round of voting was lively and interactive, and we wanted to take the time to recap some of the action in case you missed it and to quickly preview what’s still to come in the upcoming rounds of this exciting tournament. 

Hitting the Ground Running

One of the things that surprised us the most is just how quickly things got off to such a powerful start. The first round lasted for 10 days, and day one was far busier and more intense than we could have expected. The star of day one was the battle between the Colombian Air Force and Scranton Fire Department. 
Jaime Patino and the rest of the unit shared their poll far and wide and creeped out to an early lead in the voting, but Bob Cetta and the other firefighters showed they weren’t going down without a fight. Over the course of the rest of the day, the firefighters turned the tide and recaptured the lead. This battle went down to the wire with the two coins trading the lead up until the final minutes of the vote! In the end, Patino and the other South American air force pilots swooped in and snatched their victory. With a total of 933 votes between the two coins, day one showed us just what we’d gotten ourselves into. 

None of the other matchups in round one brought quite the same level of attention and participation as the Colombian Air Force and Scranton Fire Department matchup, but a lot of the polls still out performed even our expectations. Aaron Lamay’s 18 piece submarine puzzle coin gained 244 votes all by itself. Steven Schatten and his Red Mustangs racked up 213 votes for their coin. And Eddie Peterson and the Evansville Airport Fire and Rescue team drummed up 128 votes to get into the second round.

The first round also had its fair share of really close votes. On the second day of the round, James Bennett and Joel Freund took their poll down to the wire and ended up with a close vote of 11 to eight respectively. Which is nothing compared to the 16 to 15 final vote count and the eight to nine final vote count of the Tara Behm Retzlaff vs. Saige Fauth and Judy Harris vs. Charissa Neff matchups. 
As the round came to a close, a hiccup with Facebook threw a slight wrench into our timetable. When Facebook went down for the majority of the day on March 13, we were lucky that we got the polls posted before the crash, and unlucky that our contestants and fans couldn’t vote at all from almost immediately after the polls were posted until later that night. In order to keep everything fair, we gave those polls an extra 24 hours to rack in the votes. 

Looking Forward

Between the massive votes, the close matchups and technical difficulties, the first round was a wild ride from start to finish. If there’s one thing the first round of the contest proved, it’s that the polls that get the highest number of shares inevitably got the highest number of votes. So looking forward to the next rounds, the question will always be which matchups will see the most shares? 

If Jaime Patino and the other Colombian Air Force pilots can bring in that same level of support, then Lawrence Wisdom and the U.S. Air Force is in for a tough fight. Which Air Force will reign supreme? 

Likewise, Eddie Peterson and Steve Schatten each racked up over 100 votes in their respective polls and each won by a landslide. What might it be like once they’ve got a little stiffer competition? 

Three coins from the 501st Legion have progressed to the second round, but none of their first round matchups really brought the same kind of intensity seen in some of the top matchups. The question for round two is whether or not the contestants representing Vader’s First will show up and put up a fight, or will they fail to make it any further than round two? 

Ultimately, all of these questions can only be answered as the second round plays out over the next few days. Be sure to keep an eye on the polls in the Facebook event (which you can access here), and remember to vote and share the coins you want to win. Only through sharing can the impressive kinds of voting numbers we saw in the first round be replicated. But more than even all that, make sure to have fun, and good luck to all of the remaining contestants.