March Madness!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/-drew-/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Pictured above: Syracuse's Wesley Johnson

March Madness is here!

The NCAA college basketball tournament has to be one of the most exciting sports times of the year. It's also a time when employers generally look the other way as employees fill in their brackets in office betting pools. Apparently, the US economy will lose $1.8 billion in lost productivity, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas. The firm's CEO, John Challenger, says that workers waste time "filling out their brackets, researching their teams and talking around the water cooler, maybe going off to a sports bar to watch the games. And now streaming those videos from their office computers live." But he adds that the event can be "a good buy for employers in terms of morale and the trust it builds among its workers."

This year's tournament is off to a tremendous start: yesterday saw more close games, buzzer-beaters and upsets than in recent memory. The upsets meant that my bracket (like many others - including Obama's) is already in bad shape. This year I was even more subjective in my picks: I root for Syracuse, and since they are one of the top-seeded teams, I just had to pick the 'Cuse to win it all.