Thursday, February 21, 2013

2013 NCAA Basketball Conference Tournament Kickoff


Hi Everyone!

To make watching the 2013 NCAA Basketball Conference tournaments a little more interesting for the third year in a row, below are the details of a pool in which you pick the champion for each conference. This has been a ton of fun the past few years so sign up and pass it along to anyone else that may want to play!

The total cost is $25 with the following payout structure:

1st Place receives a 60% payout
2nd Place receives 30% payout
3rd Place receives 10% payout
4th Place receives a free entry for the 2014 pool

Easy Scoring System: The person with the combination of most correct picks plus bonus points wins the pool. Any tiebreakers will be decided by guessing the score of the Big 10 Championship game. Predict the combined score of the Big 10 Championship game and the person with the closest score will win any tiebreaker. (Example: If you think Team A will score 60 and Team B will score 58, you will predict a score of 118).

New for 2013: Bonus points will be available! For every 3 seed or lower winner that you pick, you will be awarded 1 bonus point. In 2012, 8 out of 31 conference tournament winners were a 3 seed or lower

To play, fill out the attached spreadsheet with the team you think will win each conference tournament and e-mail it back to me no later than Tuesday, 3/4. It shouldn't take longer than 10-15 minutes to fill everything out as I included a drop down list for each conference to allow easy and accurate selections for that conference

TIP: If you are not college basketball savvy, not all teams in some conferences make the conference tournament ,so avoid picking a last place team when viewing the current conference standings. In addition, many teams this year are ineligible for their conference tournaments, even if they are in first place. I have marked those teams as ineligible in the spreadsheet dropdowns.

Current standings can be found at http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/standings which can help show which teams are most likely to win and assume teams in 3rd place and lower are potential Bonus Picks . Standings may change between when you submit your picks and when the conference tournament starts for a particular league (i.e. A 4th place team may get hot and jump into a 1 or 2 seed, making them not a bonus pick)

Ensure you fill out your name and E-mail address on the sheet prior to sending it back to me to avoid any confusion. I will send out a master spreadsheet with everyone's picks prior to the first tournament championship (Including my picks). As conference tournaments complete at different dates through 3/17, I will post updates with the current standing at http://2013ncaachallenge.blogspot.com/
Conference tournaments begin on 3/5 with the Horizon League and Big South Conferences.

Money can be sent the following ways:


Address: 1067 Whirlway Ave. Naperville, IL 60540

In person when I see some of you

If you have any questions or want to forward this to anyone that may be interested, feel free to do so, just ensure they send the spreadsheet back by 3/4.