Mad for March

I don’t follow college basketball at all during the regular season, except for the brief updates that I hear on the radio for the local college teams. But once March Madness rolls around, I am hooked. For the past 3 or 4 years I have joined a pool with coworkers from around the company. I have no idea who organizes this pool, or who participates in it either, except for the one coworker who forwards it to me year after year. The ante to join is $5, and this year the payout to the winner is $195 – not a bad turn-around! If you win…

We use Yahoo to enter our picks and it is a really slick system – once you pick your teams, it monitors everything for you. Each year I do a little research, which basically means I see if the teams won or lost their last couple of games, and how they are ranked in the bracket, league and nation. And then I guess. I guess like a monkey might choose stocks.

Each year, I seem to run the same gamut of emotions, and so far this year is no different. In the first round of play, I generally do very well – of course, I just realized that so does everyone else if you stick with the higher seeds, and then go for a couple of upsets. I did well again this year, and was happy to see my selection for the final four still there.

And then the second round started…and so did the upsets. Bye bye Tennessee, bye bye Ohio, bye bye North Carolina. The last one hurt the most because I had them losing the final game of the tournament. This was compounded by the fact that the radio broadcaster I was listening to at the beginning of the George Mason – North Carolina Game said, “There is no way NC is going to lose this one. In fact I would bet everything that they will win by at least 10.” It was right about then I realized that he jinxed it, and my team was doomed. (On a similar but lighter note – earlier in the day one of the broadcasters commented on the Bradley vs. Pittsburgh St. game and said, “Did anyone notice that the teams’ short names on the scoreboard were Brad Pitt?”)

The slick Yahoo system also has scenario generators so that I can see that I still have a chance to win – if all of the rest of my picks go exactly as planned. I certainly won’t count my chickens, and I know that I most likely will not win, because I never do, but I’ll continue to be excited through the next round of play – and then we’ll see what happens. Poor Mr. Mingle – he’s not interested in this like I am, and I realize that the first thing I say when I walk in the door on game days is a litany of game highlights and scores. At least it’s just one month. Heaven forbid if I liked professional basketball!