Maybe you don't care. On Sunday night the top 68 teams will be chosen for the NCAA basketball championships. ESPN will analyse every bracket, every match up, and America will sharpen its pencils in an effort to complete their picks for the millions of office pools due the next day.
You can choose not to participate. That's fine. But please understand that this will exclude you from the club. Every manager, sales person, CEO, and VP are spending countless hours getting together, networking, building relationships, and comparing brackets...while you wonder while no one is asking you to attend high level power lunches.
This is not just a bunch of basketball games. As an employee, you would not say no to a round of golf with the Board of Directors despite hating golf. You would not turn down a lunch meeting with the COO at an upscale steakhouse despite being a vegetarian. And you should not turn down the opportunity to show everyone in the office that you are more than just project demos and sales projections.
But be careful. An office worker can be invited to join the office pool as a symbol of inclusion, or as a simple strategy of adding your twenty dollars to the pool with little risk to them.
In every office there is a sports junkie like me, comparing statistics. And someone like you, circling winners because in a real fight, a Bear would beat a Horned Frog.
But fear not. On Monday, I will give you my picks and you can copy them, making you the star of the fifth floor cubicles. But just in case you plan to go solo. Here are the four biggest mistakes come bracket time.
Choosing a team because you attended the school. I know. You want to support your team. You don't want to jinx them by picking against them. And it's not like you picked them to win it all. You simply felt that your school was good enough to upset a team in the first round, and get lucky in the second round. Stop it. This is about winning...duh, winning. Besides, either way you win. If your college loses, your bracket is still good. If your bracket loses, at least your college is still in it.
History. Basketball is rich with tradition. Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Kansas. Those schools are good. But so is Notre Dame, San Diego State, Pittsburgh, and Oakland. This is a year in which names like Georgetown, Louisville, Kentucky, UCLA, Arizona, Michigan State, and even North Carolina, are going home early.
Conferences. Every basketball fan follows a specific team and often feels that their team's conference is either the toughest, or under rated. ESPN will tell you that the Big East is easily the toughest conference in America. You have been following the Big Ten, Big 12, or Pac 10 all year and would take Wisconsin over Washington in a heartbeat. In the dance, it's not about conferences, it's about match ups. Senior leadership, point guards, post players. Butler made the finals last year.
Upsets. Congrats. Last year you picked a small liberal arts school in a first round upset and were the talk of the office for a day. Unfortunately, your other dark horse picks knocked you out early. Pools are won in the later rounds. You win with twelve out of sixteen left on the board, not with rolling the dice on BYU and Jimmer to win it all.
So this year, because of the play in games starting on Tuesday, you need to have your picks in on Monday! Just go to my blog, look for my picks, take complete credit, and include yourself in the least productive weeks of the year.
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