Our 2021 Office Pool Winner Is....

It felt like the game was over after the first five minutes of the championship game. Baylor dominated. Their defense, rebounding, shooting, speed, everything they did crushed Gonzaga. The Zags did get it to a single digit game with 8-9 minutes to go, and they had to work just to get to that point. It was not an exciting final game to say the least.

 
But we do have a winner for the 2021 OfficePool64 Bracket Challenge. Congratulations goes out to Edward Rhoads of Carmel, Indiana. Obviously selected Baylor to win it all, but he also had the highest pick percentage at 71% correctly picked.

Here are this year's Top Ten pick sheets.

Edward Rhoads - 176
Jim Richards - 158
Randy Laird - 156
John G Chorlian - 147
Sean P Kelly - 145
Garry Tapfer - 145
Cory Vogel - 145
Lance Shannon - 145
www.ganza.com - 144
Randy Page 9 - 143

The website is having issues again. If you get a blank page, just stop it from loading and you'll see the text. The graphics are not being loaded right now.

Any how, thank you all for participating and we will see you in 2022!!

And Then There Were Four, Ummmm Teams

We are here, we are down to the four teams: Gonzaga, Baylor, UCLA, Houston. No one predicted these final four teams, but quite a few of you selected three of four teams.

As odd as the tournament schedule has been this year, the final weekend of games plays out like it always does on Saturday and Monday. Saturday's tipoff is 5:14 ET with Baylor and Houston the first game. Gonzaga and UCLA is the second game with an approximate tipoff time of 8:34 ET. Both games are on CBS.

With only three games remaining, there are eight tournament scenarios that can happen. Here are the current links for those outcomes:
 

If Gonzaga beats Baylor
If Baylor beats Gonzaga
If Gonzaga beats Houston
If Houston beats Gonzaga
If UCLA beats Baylor
If Baylor beats UCLA
If UCLA beats Houston
If Houston beats UCLA
 

Good luck to those who are still in it.

Second Weekend Games Begins Saturday

The tournament games will finally start back up on Saturday at 1:40 PM. I don't see it noted if it's Eastern or Central time zone, so check your local listings for the exact start time.

So this week, rounds three and four will playout over Saturday through Tuesday! Kind of reminds me of what the NFL did with their schedule this past year, not playing on their normally scheduled days we've all gotten accustom too.

For this years OfficePool64 Bracket Challenge, we have 359 people in the office pool. Which is on pace from 2019 when we had 367 people playing. Now that round two is completed, the Player Scenarios link is now live. It takes several hours to calculate this link as there are right around 32,000 possibilities remaining in the standings.

I have had some quirkiness happening with my webhost, which started Monday evening. I couldn't get the standings to upload onto the webhost. It was timing out before it could get started. This also happened Wednesday into Thursday. So if the standings links were acting strange during the week for you, it was the host server acting up. If this does happen again, I'll make the standings available on my OneDrive. I believe that would work as a backup plan.

So Good To Have This Tournament Back

Welcome back to everyone who has been here before and greetings to all the new people.

Just a quick email to this years participants to let you know the standings are live and updating once per hour, at the top of the hour, after games have completed.

There are no perfect brackets remaining, and 14 of 16 is tops at this point. Way too early for your bracket to be busted, unless you had Ohio State as a final four team.

If you have any questions, you can always email me at anytime. So, enjoy this great weekend of basketball and good luck to everyone.

2021Bracket Challenge Returns!!

It feels so good to say this....

Entries are finally being accepted for the 25th OfficePool64 Bracket Challenge. We skipped over the 24th contest, obviously due to Covid-19 and the tournament being canceled, and are now at the milestone of  our 25th season. I can still count this as my 25th season, right?

The pairings were announced just minutes ago and the 2021 Bracket Challenge is underway. Once again there are 68 teams selected in the official tournament bracket. However, we will start out contest when they are down to 64 teams. The four play-in games are on Thursday this year and tip-off is on a Friday! Yes, tip-off is on a Friday this year and the rest of the schedule is off by a day from what we are used too. 

DEADLINE: Tip-Off, March 19 @ 12:30 PM [EST]
ENTRY FEE: None

Enter Your Picks Here

Bracket Notes

• Make sure you hit the SUBMIT PICKS BUTTON at the bottom of the bracket page, or your picks will not be entered into the pool.
• If you are submitting more than one bracket, please place a number after your name to make it unique, or it will overwrite your submitted pick sheet. Example: Timmy 1, Timmy 2, Timmy 3

Printable Office Pool Bracket

If you want to figure your bracket on paper first, like I always do, I have a printable bracket available in PDF format using Adobe Reader, plus a graphic version as well. The PDF version prints out bigger, I recommend to grab that one first. 

2021 Printable March Madness Bracket - PDF

2021 Printable March Madness Bracket - Graphic

 

2021 Tournament Schedule

Pre-Tournament Events
March 14: Teams Announced @ 5:00 PM [CST] on CBS
March 18: Four Play-In Games
March 19: Entry Deadline @ 11:30 AM [CST]

First Weekend Of The Tournament
March 19-20: Round One - 64 Teams
March 21-22: Round Two - 32 Teams

Second Weekend Of Games
March 27-28: Round Three - 16 Teams
March 29-30: Round Four - 8 Teams

Championship Weekend
April 3: Round Five - Semi-Finals - 4 Teams
April 5: Round Six - Championship - 2 Teams

NCAA Division I Men's Tournament Dates (2021).
Retrieved from https://www.ncaa.com/march-madness/schedule