St. Paul Saints Giving Away $10K Thanks To Historic March Madness Upset

ST. PAUL, Minn. (WCCO) -- It's one of the busiest days of the offseason for the St. Paul Saints -- the day tickets go on sale.

But general manager Derek Sharrer is a bit preoccupied with something else today.

"I don't think there's a general manager in the world that would come up with this particular idea," he said. "But I did sign off on it."

The idea was a tweet the morning after Selection Sunday that, well, speaks for itself.

A publicity stunt Sharrer never thought he'd have to follow through on. It'd never happened before.

"So yeah, it felt like a pretty safe bet," he said.

Until the unbelieveable happened.

"I'm a huge basketball fan. So I was sitting on my couch, minute by minute watching this game play out, and feeling the anxiety, and the excitement," Sharrer said.

Now he's got to pay up.

"It's a lot more fun to say that I was sweating it out not wanting to spend the money, but the reality is, the best case scenario was for one of those teams to win and really make this idea go from something small to something huge and really make it fun," Sharrer said. "We look at this like any other promotion."

And you know how the Saints do promotions. And though this one might be their most expensive one yet, they're capitalizing on it.

"Watching the engagement and the retweets, it was like watching a telethon. The number just kept going up. I believe going into the tournament, we were at 6,000 retweets. By the end of the game last night, we were reaching close to 16,000 retweets, and the potential reach was up to 6 million people. So just insane the amount of engagement that this silly little idea brought," Sharrer said.

"It's money well spent."

In:
• NCAA Tournament