March Nonsense

According to ESPN, some 8,500,000 brackets were submitted for their NCAA Men's Basketball Bracket Challenge.  Eight and a half MILLION!  As of this morning, there were ZERO perfect brackets left.  None.

Honestly, predicting outcomes of college basketball games in March is nothing like the regular season (which is hard enough, in conferences like the Big East or the Big Ten, where the big boys keep knocking each other off so you don't know who's good and who's just lucky).

But 8,500,000 to 1?  This is getting into the range of winning-the-lottery type odds.   Hey, you know what they should do with the lottery?  They should split the pot among the people who have the nearest-to-perfect numbers, no matter how bad, just like in NCAA pools.  Pay out to first, second and third place lottery number picks, and use some kind of tiebreaker scheme.

I'll bet they sell more tickets if people know they were absolutely, positively, going to pay out the whole pot each time to whichever schmuck who got closest.  As of the round of 32, I'm in 8th place (out of 53) in my office pool, and I think I'm still in it!  Just need some big team to go down that I didn't pick to go to the final four.  If this were the lottery, I'd have torn up my ticket by now.

Oh, speaking of... I need to go check last night's MegaLotto results... I got a feeling I've got some ticket shredding to do.

Hm.  Just had a final thought.  How about developing an office pool on storm tracks?  How much snow will the next winter storm dump?  Which state will get hit hardest in the upcoming hurricane season?  Maybe the Meteorologists Local #15 already does this, and they just keep the results private to protect their reputation as scientific prognosticators, when we already know their odds of being right about weather in March are about as good as mine are in predicting an all-Big-Ten and all-Big-East Final Four each year, with Wisconsin and Marquette advancing to the championship game.  :(