ESPN Tournament Challenge

Props to ESPN for correcting the complaint I had. They added into bracket cast how far a team is going in your bracket when you click on a game. Life saver!! Previous feedback: In the old app layout, you could click on a game and see what you or a member of your group picked AND it would show how far a given bracket had that team going. Is a game outcome going to affect my sweet 16? my final 4? only the round of 32? Now, I have to individually go into every single bracket — my own brackets or my competitors within my group — to answer those questions. That is a waste of time. You’re telling my the “what”, but what about the “so what”? Impacts, people! We care about impacts! I have money and a reputation on the line! Otherwise, app is great. Thank you for your time.

The bracketcast on previous versions of the app would show how far each person in a group had the winning team from each game going. So if one team lost you could tell which people in your group had them going the farthest and how many points that lost cost them towards there potential total. The current version only tells you if the person had them winning or losing. No impact of the loss whatsoever. So if you wanted that info you’d have to go into everyone’s bracket and manually see how far they had them. On top of that, they increased the size of the text/widget for each person in your group and you can only see 3 to 4 teams at once. The previous versions you could see 10ish teams at once. I haven’t found any updates that actually improve the app at all. In fact the only updates with new functionality are ice cube and fire emojis to tell you if a team hasn’t gotten a lot of picks right or if they have. It’s a head scratcher for why they chose this direction.

The app is a lot of fun. I appreciate the opportunity to fill out lots of brackets (one in which my fave teams win, one in which I predict lots of upsets, etc.). I like the auto fill options as well. But I care as much about the women’s tournament as the men’s, and I’m surprised that the women’s tournament is still an afterthought. It is a hassle to have to dig for it (and dig even deeper to get the game times). What’s worse, after I dig down to game level within my bracket, there is no way to go back one screen to the bracket. The only option is to hit exit, which sends you back to “Play More Games” level, where you have to select “play” the women’s tournament. Come on! Maybe you should just create a separate app for the women’s tournament. But I’ll give you credit for including the women’s tournament in the app; the NCAA’s own March Madness app doesn’t include anything about the women’s tournament! Crazy!