Obama's Final Four: Florida, Arizona, MSU, Louisville, with Sparty winning
President Barack Obama has unveiled his Final Four picks, and they're pretty — wait for it — conservative.
The Baracket includes a Final Four of Florida, Arizona, Michigan State and Louisville. His Elite Eight includes Kansas, Wisconsin, Villanova and Duke.
His overall champion: Michigan State, topping fellow No. 4 seed Louisville in the championship game.
"Tom Izzo is a great tournament coach," Obama said on SportsCenter. "I've got Michigan State going all the way ... He knows how to motivate folks and he knows how to coach. My pick: Michigan State. Bring it home for me. It's been a while since I've won my pool."
Last year, Obama's bracket ranked in the 74.4th percentile of ESPN.com brackets. Still, his late-round picks have been fairly sketchy: according to the National Journal, of the last 24 Final Four teams, Obama has picked only seven correctly. (For those who will inevitably whine that a president should be running the country instead of making NCAA picks, we're sure you won't check any tourney scores this week until you clock out, right?)
Obama's picks are fairly chalky, as they've been for most of the six years he's been releasing his presidential bracket. (Related: expect Fox News to roll out a bracket featuring No. 16 Coastal Carolina meeting No. 16 Weber State for the national championship.) While the No. 4s of Louisville and Michigan State are the two lowest-seeded teams he has reaching the Elite Eight, both are considered underseeded and both are trendy picks across the country. His only significant early-round upsets are No. 12s Harvard and North Dakota State over No. 5s Cincinnati and Oklahoma, respectively.
"I know these are not imaginative picks," Obama conceded during a SportsCenter airing of his bracket. "But I think they're the right ones."
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