Life does, in fact, have a purpose

I'll admit it...I'm crying a lot these days. First it was about three months solid of crying while Cal muddled through the Pac-10 season. Then it was when I visited Santa Clara to watch them beat USF and I thought Eddie Sutton had finally died (in fact, that's just how he coached - eyes closed, head tilted back, limp body). Then of course, the NCAA releases the finest tome ever created (Official 2008 NCAA Men's Basketball Records Book ...damn, here I go again with the waterworks), and now it's this beautifully-written piece that nicely summarizes why we obsessively focus on March Madness every year - America’s Tournament: Buttoned down, by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports. Here's a sample:


As advances in technology go, the internet’s ability to broadcast NCAA tournament games has to rank up there with Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type, Heinrich Hertz’s Electromagnetic Theory of Light and the genius who figured out how to put bottled beer taste in a can.


Just last year American businesses lost an estimated $1.2 billion in worker productivity during the NCAA tournament, mostly during its first two days. And that was before the internet feed was as widely available or as high of quality as it will be this year.

What the NCAA never wants to admit is that much of the tournament’s popularity is due to gambling and not just in legal Las Vegas sports books that are overloaded this weekend. It’s the office pools that serve as a great equalizer when Maria from human resources gets the better of all those CSTV junkies because her dominant state flower formula magically predicts the 12-over-5 upsets.


We illegally wager the GNP of a small country on this tournament. But no one ever seems to do anything about it, probably because at this very moment inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, home of the FBI itself, a bracket is getting passed around.


And if Belmont gets up on Duke or Austin Peay puts a scare into Texas you can bet there will be muffled cheers from their federal cubicles just like in every other office.


That’s the magic of America’s Tournament.



Just think of that...over $1.2 billion wasted in office productivity because of office pools, and you're contributing to it. God bless you.