pimblr.com

With his contribution to the Super Bowl pool long forgotten, Stephen DeAnda knows it’s time to kick $5 into the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament office pool. (Illustration by Nacho L. Garcia Jr. / El Paso Times)
With his contribution to the Super Bowl pool long forgotten, Stephen DeAnda knows it’s time to kick $5 into the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament office pool.
“It’s something I look forward to ever year,” said DeAnda, who manages a local tire company. “All our employees look forward to it. It’s great for morale because everyone talks about why they made certain picks.”
The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament will begin Thursday — though there is a play-in game tonight — but the real March Madness began weeks ago as college basketball fans started to think about one of the most hallowed March traditions, the office bracket pool.
“The popularity of office pools during the NCAA basketball tournament is amazing,” said Rosario Kaufman, office manager at an El Paso car dealership. “Its funny because some people, mostly the men, get really into it and and spend days analyzing the field. Me? I just go by gut feeling.”
Sunday, the NCAA filled out the 65-team field that will lead to the promised land of the Final Four on April 5 in San Antonio. The championship will be April 7.
You can almost guarantee that millions of Americans had their brackets e-mailed or faxed to the person in charge of the office pool long before that.
Kaufman, who is in charge of the $10-a-bracket pool, doesn’t remember who won the NCAA
tournament last year (it was Florida), but she does remember who won the office pool.
“It came down to our general manager and one of the sales guys,” she said. “It was fun watching those guys going at all the way up to the championship. It was good, clean fun.”

origin.elpasotimes.com

Now that the NCAA Tournament brackets are set, the time has come to figure out who will get to the ultimate stage. For all of the NCAA Tournament’s early upsets, the Final Four is usually made up of the usual favorites and slightly lower seeded teams from power conferences. George Mason was the exception two years ago, but last year’s Final Four had a more stable offering of two number 1 and two number 2 seeds. This year, it would appear that the NCAA Tournament favorites have a clear path to the Final Four. But who will come out of each bracket for real?
East Regional Bracket- North Carolina Tar Heels
The Tar Heels are the overall number 1 NCAA seed, with only two losses at home this season. With the likely Player of the Year in Tyler Hansbrough, the Tar Heels have a clear mission to overcome their come from ahead loss in last year’s Elite 8. In addition, all of the Tar Heels potential games in the East Regional would be in the state of North Carolina.
Behind them, Tennessee has been on top of the SEC most of the year, having only slipped down to a number 2 seed in the final weekend. However, the Volunteers will always be suspect since they don’t have a big men’s basketball tradition. In addition, they could get tripped up in the second round by mid-major powers Butler or South Alabama.

read_more

“There’s something to this that defies rational explanation,” says Lunardi, who this weekend will appear wall to wall on various ESPN channels. “People say I must have had a grand plan, but I’m not that smart.”
No one is. Lunardi — a.k.a. “Joey Brackets” — is the father of bracketology, the term for the incessant musing about NCAA tournament teams and seedings which will be feverish until CBS’ NCAA Selection Show Sunday ends the suspense and starts the second-guessing.
Lunardi didn’t think about brackets until he was a student in 1982 at St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia — where he’s now an assistant marketing vice president for non-athletic areas — and hoped its team would get a certain seed and play a No. 1 seed in the second round on TV: “Getting even one national TV game in a decade was huge!”
By 1996, he began offering “bracket guesses” on ESPN.com. One day in 2002, he got his own page, linked to ESPN.com’s home page, and in under two hours got more than 250,000 hits. He says ESPN took notice: “At some point, somebody said, ‘Can this guy speak, too?’ “
He became an on-air fixture, missing only 10 NCAA team predictions in eight years: “Half those misses was my faulty analysis, the others the committee got wrong. They’re human, too.”

read_more

“Guitar Hero” is what pitted them against each other Saturday afternoon at Indian Mound Mall in Heath; skateboarding was the reason they were in the competition to begin with.
The two were among a crowd of about 80 participants and supporters who crammed the X-Gear extreme sportswear store Saturday for a “Guitar Hero” showdown to raise money for the Everett Skate Park renovation project.
“I think they’re interested in helping get the skate park started,” X-Gear co-owner Barb Stevison said. “If they know it’s going to their cause, they’re more ready to donate.”
It was the case for Mitchell, who edged Woehrle out for the title “Guitar Hero” champion at the medium level. He won a Muska skateboard deck — the platform part of a skateboard — featuring a flashy silver and pink sunglasses design.
“Anytime I hear there’s going to be something with the skate park, I try to help out,” said Mitchell, who has attended past fundraisers for the park.
The expert winner was Mason Spangler, of Newark, whose prize was an Element skateboard.
Contestants in the single-elimination tournament had to register in advance and pay a $3 entry fee; they then were placed into a bracket in their choice of the medium or expert “Guitar Hero” levels.

read_more