2014 NCAA Basketball Conference Tournament Pool

Hi Everyone!

To make watching the NCAA Basketball 2014 Conference tournaments a little more interesting for the 4th 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 entry fee is $30 with the following payout structure:  

• 1st Place receives a 70% payout
• 2nd Place receives a 20% payout
• 3rd Place receives a 10% payout
• 4th Place receives a free entry for the 2014 pool*
• Most Bonus Points receives a $90 payout (New for 2014!)

*This years free entry is awarded to Joel based on his 2013 finish

This Pool Has a Very Easy Scoring System: The person with the combination of most correct picks, including bonus points, wins the pool.  Any tiebreakers will be decided by guessing the score of the Big 10 Championship game. 

Tiebreaker Details:  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).  Do not forget to pick your Big 10 score on the spreadsheet.

The Bonus Points Are Simple: For every 3 seed or lower winner that you pick, you will be awarded 1 bonus point.  In 2013 11 out of 31 (35%) conference tournament winners were a 3 seed or lower.

To get started, 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 Sunday, 3/2. It really shouldn't take longer than 5-10 minutes to fill everything out as I included a drop down list for each conference to allow easy and accurate selections for that conference.  The seed numbers currently shown in the excel spreadsheet may change over the next few weeks as the regular season comes to an end, and they will be updated as they change.

Here are some tips (If you care!):  If you are not college basketball savvy, NOT all teams in some conferences make the conference tournament, so it's wise to avoid picking a last place team when viewing the current conference standings on ESPN, CBS Sports, or any other college basketball website.  In addition, many teams this year are ineligible for their conference tournaments, even if they are in first place.  I have marked all known teams as ineligible or DNQ for the tournament in the spreadsheet drop downs.  Additional teams may be added, but it is current up to the date of this note.

More tips and tricks to be aware of - 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 you can assume teams in 3rd place and lower are potential Bonus Picks .  But remember, standings may and probably will 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, known bonus points, and conference info prior to the first tournament championship game (Including my picks).  

As conference tournaments complete at different dates through Sunday, 3/16 I will post updates with the current standing  at:

 http://2014ncaaconferencetournamentchallenge.blogspot.com/

I would highly suggest to subscribe to the blog if you want consistent updates as I will avoid sending constant updates to everyone's e-mail.  Every few days however, I will send out a excel copy of the standings.  You can subscribe by entering your e-mail address on the right hand side of the page.

As the tournament gets underway, and we start to have teams eliminated early on, I will post numerous updates to the standings here (Bookmark this link for the standings)

                                 Conference tournaments begin on March 3 with the Patriot League!

 

Money can be sent the following ways:  

PayPal:  rwdpeanut@gmail.com

Address: 1067 Whirlway Ave.  Naperville, IL 60540  

In Person/Vegas

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 3/2.  I'll probably cap the entries at 25-30 people, so if you are interested but don't yet want to fill out the spreadsheet ,or planning to send this to a friend, just let me know so I reserve your spots.

Thanks!

Rick Donegan

630-885-2873