We created a Yahoo NCAA March Madness Tourney Pool for any one interested in joining.

They have made it very easy to make your picks in a matter of minutes with a drag and drop feature.
There is also click-able information for those inclined to really spend the time trying to make "educated" predictions, etc.

If you just want to try your luck and have some fun (it does make watching some of the lesser games a bit more exciting),
you can easily put together a bracket in less than 10 minutes.....

The name of the pool is FPP-MarchMadness, see the thread in the private area for the login credentials....

(Note, even if you hate the thuggery of the NBA and refuse to watch any of their games, this college game is a world apart, kind of like going back a bit in time, a great team game is played, tons of that old school spirit on display, and the lower ranked teams can get on a Cinderella run at any point..... almost makes you think that you are once again living in the America of your childhood!! Yes, it is that much fun!!)

Quote: Sanguine wrote in post #9

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I have to admit this, I'm not sure what brackets are or why I would want one....

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Oh, I see that we have done a terrible job of explaining the basics!! Let me try:

- there is an NCAA College Basketball Tournament starting today (actually there are two tournaments, one for the Men's teams and one for the Women's teams, but about 98+% of the attention is focused on the Men's tourney each year, but each year a bit more attention is placed on the Women's tourney..... this pool we have is for the Men's tourney)

- there are 64 teams competing, a seeding committee has done two things already (with their work being announced last Sunday evening on what is known as "Selection Sunday!!"):
-- selected the 64 teams that will compete (actually I am skipping the early round of "play in" games that have already happened for the sake of simplicity!!)
-- assigned a relative rank or "seed" for each of these teams and paired them up for the first 32 games (8 games in each of 4 "regions" that are named geographically) that start around 12:30PM EDT today (this framework of competition is called the "bracket" and when you fill out your picks, you have created "your bracket!!")

- the object of the pool is to pick as many of the winners of each game, in each round. So for the first round, you are trying to pick the 32 winners of these games. You get a point for each winner that you pick. (It is a "one and done" tourney in that as soon as a team fails to win a game, they are out of the tourney, also called "single elimination" style.)

- the subsequent rounds each get harder to pick, because at this point in time, we are all unsure as to who the winners of the preceding round(s) will be...

- you get additional points for each round in which you picked the winner of a game...

- the ultimate goal is to pick the Winner of the Final Game, the National Champion, and along the way accumulate the most points possible by picking the winners of as many games as you can...

Obviously it is very hard to do!! I think that once in the history of this whole thing, someone actually had a "perfect" bracket, i.e., they successfully predicted the winner of every single game in the tournament!! Considering the way any game is played, with the outcome subject to so many variables, there was a great deal of LUCK involved in picking that bracket!!

If you look at the lower right corner of the prior year bracket that W posted above, at first you will try to pick the winner between Michigan (seed 2 in that "region" or quadrant) and Wolford (15th seed), and the winner between Texas (7) and Arizona State (10)... then, the winner of the Michigan-Wolford game vs. the winner of the Texas-ArizonaState game...... and so forth..... and as you can readily see, if you didn't pick the winners of the game in the preceding round correctly, your pick for the next round is already a loser......

Anyway, I hope that explains the basics of an NCAA BB Tourney pool better!!

(And that you can see how watching and/or tracking the results of all of these games over the next few weeks can really be a big distraction away from the rest of your life!!)


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