Superstar pinch hitter Jon Marthaler will be around with frequency, taking you through the ins and outs, ups and downs of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which — get out from under that rock — starts today. Here is the first of many odes to what he considers the best two days of the year — and a little final consideration for all of you in office pools:

Today’s the first day of the NCAA basketball tournament, which means it’s also the Big Day for quasi-legal gambling across the country. Yes, I’m talking about the tradition of office pools, in which everybody throws in five bucks that they could otherwise have set on fire, for all the good it’ll do them. Here’s a little-known fact: it is impossible to to win the office NCAA Tournament pool. No matter how much basketball you watch, no matter how obsessively you study this year’s field, no matter how many hours of Dick Vitale you subject yourself to, there will always be somebody that beats you who picked his or her bracket based on team colors and the relative “fuzziness” of mascots.

Another little-known fact is that the size of the office pool does not matter. Whether your office has six participants or 600, your chances of winning are 0%. Even Powerball is a better investment vehicle for your hard-earned dollars. With this in mind, you’d think that the tradition of filling out brackets would by now have fallen by the wayside. When I was a kid, I remember the teachers in school once participating in a pool that basically amounted to a lottery; they got 64 teachers and staff members to each throw in a dollar, then drew names for each team. If you got Duke, you had a shot; if you got, say, Bucknell, your tournament was more or less over. When you think about it, this method is hardly less fair than actually having everyone go through the process of actually filling out a bracket. The whole thing is based on blind luck and random guessing anyway; it’d make sense to just disregard the pretense that the pool is based on skill, and draw lots for the winner.

However, if we did it this way, we’d miss out on the reason that today and tomorrow are the best two sports days of the year: cheering for random upsets, 32 times in two days. You may not know a thing about Oral Roberts or even where it is, but you have to admit, if you picked them to beat Pittsburgh and somebody walks by your cubicle at 3:15 this afternoon and says, “Hey, I heard Oral Roberts is up by three”, you know that not only are you scrambling to the nearest TV to watch the second half, you’re going to be pulling for the Golden Eagles like you had ten grand riding on the game. As silly as it sounds, that excitement, right there, might be worth the five bucks that you’re guaranteed to lose.

Here’s the CBS broadcast schedule for the Twin Cities area today:

11:30 - #5 Michigan State vs. #12 Temple
1:30 - #6 Marquette vs. #11 Kentucky
6:10 - #6 USC vs. #11 Kansas State
8:40 - #3 Wisconsin vs. #14 Cal State-Fullerton

A couple of notes there: first, none of these games are “constant,” meaning that if, for example, Michigan State is up 42 on Temple in the second half, CBS will cut away to a better game. Second, if your local CBS affiliate is Sioux Falls or Fargo, you’ll get Portland State vs. Kansas this morning. And finally: Gus Johnson will be in Denver, calling Michigan State vs. Temple. It’s just not March Madness until you hear Gus’s voice, and we’re blessed to be able to start off the day with him on our TV screens and internet browsers. (To watch from your desk, here’s the link: NCAA(R) March Madness(R) on Demand Homepage. Don’t blame us if it gets you fired, though.)

Here’s hoping you’re ready for March Madness — and that you’ve already finished and turned in your picks to the office pool. The best two sports days of the year are about to begin.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 8:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.