roe conn

It's that time of year again: days are getting longer, the weather's warming up (a bit), and 65 college basketball teams are hoping to be the last ones standing when the buzzer sounds, ending the last of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament's 64 games. roe conn

For last year's March Madness, I created a version of the tournament brackets on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and invited readers to download it to make and share their picks. This year's version of the brackets spreadsheet includes a form you can use to make your picks and post them to the public version of the spreadsheets.


Use the "Choose from a list" option to create simple drop-down menus for making your NCAA basketball picks.

(Credit: Google Docs and Spreadsheets)
(Note that a bug in the form moves the 1 vs. 16 and 3 vs. 14 games of the South region's first round to the finals and regional sections, respectively. I couldn't figure out why those two games kept jumping to the end of the queue, so I left them there for now. I'll try to get them back in line prior to Thursday's tip-off.)

You won't win a major prize, if your selections are the most accurate; I'm just a poor blogger, after all, not a multimillion-dollar sports network. If it's fame and fortune you're after, you'll find no shortage of sites that let you compete with thousands or millions of other b-ball prognosticators.

The online files I created are just for fun, as you'll probably discern after you get a load of my off-the-wall selections. The form that accompanies the brackets uses simple two-item drop-down menus for recording your winners in the first round and text boxes for entering your selections in subsequent rounds.

You may notice that in my picks, I stuck with the chalk most of the time. Last year, I was picking upsets left and right, only to have the four No. 1 seeds make it to the the Final Four. I don't see all the top seeds making it to Detroit this year, though I did pick two No. 1s and two No. 2s. roe conn

And who do I think is going to win it all this year? None other than Oklahoma over Connecticut in the final. You heard it here first.