March Madness 2015 - 1 hour till tipoff

Well, there's about an hour before the start of the NCAA tournament.  I think my scheme of having everyone send me their picks instead of entering them in a room on-line is working out pretty much the way I wanted it to.  I actually will have time to watch the early games instead of spending the first 5 hours of the tournament entering data into spreadsheets.  Now I just shifted that work to the night before.  That's a win for me.

I also was thinking that in order to enter my pool, you have to be more pro-active.  That leads to fewer people stiffing me on payment.  It also makes things easier for me track as to who has paid and who hasn't.  I'll be posting something later about who I haven't got payments from sometime next week.  That's always been an administrative nightmare, and this method seems to alleviate that.

The only downside is that this will probably be the first year I have fewer entries than the year before.  A lot of that is because I made it a little harder to enter, but we'll still wind up with around 200 entries, so that's still a good payout for the first 4 places.

I am ready to go at my brothers place.  I've got essentially 5 screens to work with.  2 huge TV's, 1 giant tablet for streaming and 2 regular computer screens, and plenty of basketball to watch.  I also have some pizza and soda to keep me going for the day.

For those that know me, my expansive college T-shirt collection has grown since last year.  Today, I decided to wear my Eastern Washington T-shirt.  I debated Georgia State or UAB, but I actually want Eastern Washington to win, so I opted for them.

More stats to come as the games start and the final entry list gets finalized.  IF you sent me an e-mail, I responded back to everyone I got.  Some people left some spots blank.  I asked about those if I saw them.  If I don't hear back, I'm going to default to the better seeded team.

Also, despite the best efforts, no one has entered a bracket entirely by the seeds.  One person tried to do it, and after looking it up, Villanova was the overall #2 seed, not Duke, so having a Kentucky/Duke final is not technically by the seeds.  Not much by way of courage, but not truly "gutless".  Maybe "Iota of guts".

Good luck to everyone!!!