If anyone has a free bracket group on CBS/ESPN/Yahoo (or anything else), I’ll join. I know absolutely NOTHING about college sports, so I will only lift up the rest of the players in your group.
Someone asked me to create a group to join. I laughed at the thought of hosting my own group. After laughing myself out of my chair, I made a group on all of the three big services.
• Yahoo: Join “Shinkū Gijutsu’s Legit Group”
• ESPN: Join “Astrotrain Voyage”
• CBS: Join “Will a basketball sink or float on Saturn?”
All three pools/groups are free. Anyone can join. Anyone can crush me. Feel free to share any of these links with other people.
Is it called “group” or “pool”? Pool makes it sound like there’s money involved (which there is not), or we are having a pool party with floaty toys. The only thing that floats around here is basketballs. And I’m not even sure if they float on Saturn. Hence, why I named the CBS group as “Will a basketball sink or float on Saturn?”. It’s an out-of-this-world group, so it has an out-of-this-world point structure. Here’s the default points that CBS provides:
- 1st round (1 point)
- 2nd round (2 points)
- Sweet 16 (4 points)
- Elite 8 (8 points)
- Final Four (16 points)
- Championship (32 points)
Oh no. Too boring. Why go with the standard? Let’s flip this around and make the first round more important. That’s the only part we watch, right? Well, that’s the only part I pay attention to, because I end up losing so bad in the later rounds.
For CBS, let’s go with:
- 1st round (100 points)
- 2nd round (50 points)
- Sweet 16 (25 points)
- Elite 8 (12 points)
- Final Four (6 points)
- Championship (199 points)
I’m sorry, but I tried making the championship worth 10,000 points. But the highest they allow is 199. So be it.
When coming up with names for the pools, I looked up anagrams for the various March Madness names. Here’s the best anagrams for March Madness:
- March Madness: Scam Herdsman
- NCAA Tournament: Aura Cantonment
- Mens Tournament Challenge: Such Ornamental Gentlemen
I thought this would be a clever way of naming a pool. But the names weren’t all that exciting, so I came up some other names. My favorite is probably the Astrotrain Voyage. Joining a March Madness pool is a bit like going on a voyage.
Most of you are probably not familiar with Astrotrain. He’s a Transformer that changes into a space shuttle. In the Transformers movie, they had to boot a bunch of the Decepticons off the space shuttle. Carrying that over to March Madness—that’s usually me getting booted out of the tournament when all my teams have lost.
I love how these groups allow the manager to add a slogan. Why would a March Madness pool need a slogan? I don’t know. Maybe because it’s a lot of fun. The slogan for the Astrotrain Voyage is great: “In confusion, there is opportunity“.
That’s legit Astrotrain’s quote from his Tech Specs card. Perhaps in my confusion in March Madness, there is opportunity for me to be lucky and have a couple of my picks win some games.
Oh, and in case you are wondering about Shinkū Gijutsu. That’s my self-declared Japanese name I made up years ago for Yahoo. Shinkū Gijutsu translates to art vacuum. I’ll save the explanation for that in a later blog post. (Hey, why don’t you subscribe to my email newsletter, so you can get that post when it publishes)
Ok, so join one of these already and destroy me! Or if you want to be nice, make really bad picks, and make me win. That would be hilarious.