If you guys REALLY want to have a March Madness game that is fun, draft players and add up their points scored over the course of the entire tournament. Whomever drafter's combined points is the most wins. I did it for about 6 years and it is completely addictive and 10x more fun than this.
Here's how it works:
1. After the brackets are announced on Sunday evening, everyone is fed a file that shows the stats of every player on every team. Okay, you would only consider 7 deep on each team max.
2. It usually works best with about 10 drafters, and everyone drafts about 10 players. I suppose you can go deeper, but we never did more than 12 rounds.
3. Flip a coin or otherwise randomize draft order, and it snakes back and forth. If you pick 1st, you then pick 20th. If you pick 10th, you pick 11th. And so forth.
4. The most difficult part of this is having to get everyone together at the same time in order to DO the draft. It could done at a bar over a couple hours. Or we'd do it all day at work via email. Or 30 min conference call with stock traders. I actually think the programmer type that creates a website that performed this service could make a decent business out of it. Maybe one already exists, I don't know.
The reason why it's so much more fun is that while rooting for a team to advance, you are also rooting for YOUR GUY to shoot, not the OTHER GUY on the same team. It makes each possession count.
Further, odd ball things happen like foul trouble, injuries, or a 6-man coming off the bench and scoring 31 in the final round, which was just ridiculous.
If BI had 30 guys that wanted to do it, I'd set up 3 groups of 10. There would be 3 winners for 2019, and I'd take the top 10 finishers across all those groups and put them into the Championship bracket for 2020. The second group of 10 would be in an Also-Rans 2020 bracket. And then there would be a Unlucky Losers bracket. Perhaps we'd call that the Redeemers Rondo.
Let me tell you, there's a lot of pride in winning it all, and you wouldn't want to be in the bottom group subsequent years in a row. Patterns among both players and drafter performances DO emerge! (I'm not giving away my draft secrets, but we can talk about it after the fact!)
It's the most fun I've ever had with TV sports. But it requires equally insane basketball aficionados to participate. Once you do this, the typical bracket game is stupid. Trust me.
Scoreboard is posted as games conclude, and you'd find yourself checking back regularly, not just which team wins and loses, but box scores. It's a bummer if your guy goes for only 8 points in a game, but it's worse when they lose, because they can't score in the next game. It becomes laughable when certain participants lose nearly all their draft picks. Doom. But you have to balance drafting high scoring players with guys who are likely to survive and play as many games as possible. 2 games at 25 per is the same as 5 games at 10 per. That's the challenge. It's very granular, requires a good amount of study pre-draft. And then, how do you evaluate where to draft your Golden Bear players. And wanting to win occasionally means you have to go to the dark side and draft a, say, Travis Reid.
