Madness

Attention hack business journalists: you are free to write stories every March about how many hours of productivity are lost to the NCAA basketball tournament as long as you balance it out with stories about how many additional hours of productivity are gained throughout the year when employees do extra work after hours and over weekends and holidays for no additional pay.

Bracket Coverage

I enter a modest college football betting pool every season, but I rarely fill out an NCAA bracket and when I do, I never have any money riding on it. I may want to reconsider this strategy, as I tend to fare rather poorly in my football pool but finish near the top in March. This year has been no exception, so far. I managed to get three of the final four correct. The only one I missed was Florida (I had Maryland) and the only reason I missed Florida was because I'm kind of sick of them. Were I playing with my head instead of my heart, perhaps I would have had the Gators in the final four. The last time I remember filling out a bracket, I managed to guess the entire final four correctly (2002). I attribute my success in the NCAA basketball tournament to my lack of knowledge about and interest in college basketball. I tend to put a lot of effort into my bowl picks because I've always watched a lot more college football than college basketball and feel like I know enough to make intelligent decisions. For what it's worth, I have Ohio State over UCLA in the final.