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I probably shouldn’t mention this on the internet, but there is a butt ton of illegal gambling going on at my office.  We have office pools for everything. We have a pool each week during football season, and a bigger pool for the playoffs. We have a gambling pool on who the next person to retire is, and how long some “retired” employees stay gone before coming back to work at least part time. So, here it is, the middle of March, and of course, we’ve got a March Madness NCAA Basketball Championship pool. I feel that at this point it would be irresponsible of us as illegal bookies not to have a March Madness pool, even if no one really cares about basketball.

 

 

No one really cares about college basketball.

Now, I know a couple of people who do actually care, or at least pretend to care about it all season long, but the majority of people don’t even pretend to care about college baskeball (or basketball in general) until tournament time.  Come the middle of March, we’re all not only basketball fans, we’re experts. We carefully craft our brackets with the a careful and calculated method based on coach, team, and players specifics. We spend a few hours on the internet checking injury reports and win/loss ratios. We each practically gain a degree in advanced sports statistics each year in preparation for the bracket. All this research, and we still always loose to the woman in our office that isn’t entire sure what sport she’s filling a sheet out for.

I think March Madness is secretly a celebration for the end of winter. We all can go a little crazy, throw $5 to the pot and never think twice about it. Secretly, it gets us all to start talking excitedly about the same thing, building camaraderie and creating a competitive air about the office. March Madness isn’t about basketball, its about getting us to work harder and more productively. March Madness boosts morale in the office place. No wonder there is a pool just about everywhere.

I’ll let you all in on a little secret. I picked Ohio State. I don’t even know if Ohio State is good, but they have a little 1 next to their name on the top of the bracket, and they are the first team listed in the upper left hand corner of my sheet. That’s my picking strategy for you. I pick the team with the lowest numbers and I pick them from there in a counterclockwise order.

So far, I’ve picked 11 teams correctly and been wrong on 5, which will extend out to 8 automatically, because that’s how picking wrong in a bracket works some times. I guess that means I have a decent strategy.

I still can’t believe Morehead beat Louisville… I think I picked Louisville to win all of it last year. Maybe next time, I’ll try picking the team that has the dirtiest sounding name.