Your hosts: Joe Spain and David Mace
March Madness Contest
The 2022 March Madness contest will officially start with the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Selection Committee’s naming of the 68 teams who will participate in the annual post season tournament that leads up to the national championship game in early April. They will be named on Selection Sunday, March 13, and will be publicized all over in the media and on the Internet.
At the DMA, at our regular March 16 weekly meeting, members who wish to participate in the contest will hand in their entry sheets naming eight teams of their choosing from the 68 ranked teams that the NCAA has placed in its four regional brackets. We will have distributed entry sheet forms at the prior week’s meeting, and the form also will be available on the DMA website. The entry fee for each sheet shall be $5.00, the same as in prior years, and members can submit entries for themselves and for family members, but each entry should include the name of the DMA member who is submitting it.
The contest objective is to name teams that will win in the successive rounds of games in their respective regions. The entry sheet will be awarded points every time one of its eight named teams wins a game in this single elimination tournament. The number of points awarded for each win will equal the NCAA assigned ranking of that winning team in their tournament region. If a member’s sheet names a team that ranks five in one of the regions, then five points will be tallied on his sheet each time that team wins a game. If another team named on that sheet is a 12th ranked team, then the sheet receives 12 points each time that team wins a game. Teams that lose get no points and are out of the tournament. Only the winning teams continue to play into the succeeding rounds of games over the approximate two weeks when the tournament games will be played at the more than a dozen game venues all over the country.
Each entry sheet should have a circle drawn around the name of one of its teams, indicating that the entrant has chosen that team to be the tournament winner and National Champion. Circling the correct choice of the tournament winner means the sheet could be awarded an additional 25 bonus points in the contest tally. That circled team will have won all of its tournament games, right up to the championship game on Monday, April 4, and each win will have earned points for the entry sheet equal to its NCAA tournament ranking in its assigned division. But if it is the champ, it probably was placed high in the rankings, and every win will have yielded only a few points – save for the handsome bonus of 25 points for becoming Champion.
And, yes – there will be prizes. The winning sheet, the one with the most total points, gets the first prize of $100. And the runners-up get $50 each, until we have handed out all the funds that came in as entry fees. We hope we have a strong showing on the entry line on March 16 when we shall be receiving the entries.
We will hand out entry form sheets at the Wednesday, March 9 DMA meeting, and will have them again at the March 16 meeting, plus members can print their own sheet from the file that will be on our website. There may be some members who want to enter but are not yet ready to come to our Wednesday in-person meetings at the DCA. To accommodate them, the Wanderers plan to stay late after the meeting on March 16 for about half an hour, so members can drop by when most of the crowd has dissipated and make their entry in the vestibule, or outside, if the weather is dry.
Astute DMA members will, by now, have figured out that the entry sheet that has a high chance of winning our contest is one that names teams that received somewhat low rankings in their assigned region by the NCAA Selection Committee, but in reality, turn out to be much better than the rank the Committee gave them. They may be a nine or a thirteen ranked team, but they can defeat the higher ranked teams that they will be facing in each tournament round. And each win will yield bountiful points for their entry sheets. These are often called the Cinderella teams, and an entrant would do well to choose such teams for seven of the teams listed on his sheet. As for the eighth slot on your sheet, that is reserved for the team who will win the tournament, so make sure its name is circled. It doesn’t matter that it may receive only one or two points every time it wins, for the pay-off there is when your circled team keeps on winning and brings home the 25 bonus points. It may turn out that several entrants’ sheets have named and circled the same winning team to become the champ. If so, all such sheets will receive the 25 bonus points.