High Street bar Joe Mamas made a solid run in 5th Year’s college-town bar bracket, they made it clear to the elite 8 before being outvoted by Rutgers bar, the Scarlet Pub.
It was neck and neck for most of the match up, but Rutgers broke away just before the polls closed. Even though it’s debatable whether or not WVU’s involvement was beneficial at all, tons of people were still outraged. I get it, especially for schools that didn’t make the actual NCAA tournament, this is kind of all they have. It serves as a fun, alternative, replacement for universities that didn’t get to participate in the legitimate “March Madness”. I can definitely see why people get into it as much as they do, even if it may not shine your school in the most positive light.
But whats a good contest without controversy? Like anyone on the losing side of a poll, Joe Mamas fans instantaneously demanded a recount. And from there, the accusations began.
Apparently, around 4 am, votes on Rutgers side hit a drastic spike. Something like 200 votes were coming in every 10 minutes, which is clearly unlikely, especially for that time of day.
Unfortunately this “matchup” is just a Twitter poll, so there’s no real way to prove whether or not someone’s cheating. Buying bot votes is an extremely easy way to completely rig the contest, I’d honestly be surprised if that didn’t happen somewhere along the way anyway. Literally all you have to do is google “buy twitter votes” and browse the loads of websites that exist, I even found one that offered 100,000 votes in exchange for $2600.
So Scarlet Pub’s excuse that they’re not “suddenly a tech expert who knows how to use bots” doesn’t really hold up. The sad thing is that we’ll probably never know. Everyone’s innocent until proven guilty, and on a platform like a Twitter poll, there’s no available evidence.
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