No Mas Roth IX: Inside Story of a Celebrity Bracket Pool Winner

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A lot of celebrities host bracket pools during March Madness, all with different terms and qualifications. Billionaire Warren Buffet offers $1 million per year for life to his employees if they can pick a perfect bracket, with the closest participant taking home $100,000 as a backup. Others, like Dan Patrick, offer their challenge exclusively to celebrities. Then, there are guys like Asher Roth, who do it for the general public — no exclusions necessary.

Roth’s 2018 challenge, No Mas Roth IX, is one of the longest-running celebrity bracket challenges out there. It’s free for everyone, used simply as a way for Asher to connect with his loyal fanbase. After all, as we reported earlier this year, Roth is a sports junkie who initially dreamt of playing professional baseball.

On Monday night, immediately after Roth’s hometown Wildcats took home the NCAA Championship, the champion of No Mas Roth IX was announced via Twitter:

Todd Dayton, a 29-year-old resident of Long Island, NY, won the title after correctly choosing three Final Four teams and Villanova as his champion. Besides old-fashioned pride from a hard-fought W, Dayton was also honored with a highly-coveted follow from Roth himself. It was his first-ever win in the No Mas Roth event.

“Whenever Selection Sunday happens, I always wait for the link to join No Mas Roth,” Dayton told Slackie Brown after his victory. “This is my fourth year in the bracket.”

And of course, Dayton, like so many other folks who came-of-age during in the late-2000s and early-2010s, is a dedicated flag-bearer of Asher Roth’s music.

“I’m just a fan of Asher’s music,” he told me. “I started listening to him around 2009 before Asleep in the Bread Aisle dropped, watched Tom Boyd’s Boydercam YouTube videos, and just became a fan. His music is real: a lot of sports, wrestling, and other relatable things in his lyrics.”

As for the strategy that brought home the hardware, Dayton benefited from being a legitimate college basketball fan — “My strategy was really just going off of what I’ve seen during the season.”

With college hoops in the books, Asher has moved onto baseball season. Just today, he released a Tony Gwynn-inspired hat on his website — RetroHash — which can be seen or purchased here.

Music-wise, Roth is currently working on an album with Oren Yoel — billed at Tofer Dolan.