Duke Report - Unique March Madness Pick 'Em Pool

It’s that time of year again when friends and coworkers across the country are getting together to fill out brackets for March Madness.  I am one of those guys who watches the selections shows, surfs different sports websites for their advice, and still buys two different newspapers... (wait... do they still make newspapers?...) to read before filling out my bracket. A couple days later, I find I can’t get through the first round undefeated.  But then again, very few get through Thursday and Friday with a perfect bracket.

The thing I love about March Madness is that it brings people from different walks of life together.  You have your diehard sports fans filling out brackets, as well as people who don’t follow sports but love to fill out a bracket.  I have had friends who don’t follow sports who make their picks based on the mascot or even team colors.

Several years ago, I joined a unique March Madness office pool at work created by my buddy whose nickname is “The Flo” and have been hooked ever since.  What I like about this office pool is that it is something different than your normal “fill out a bracket” office pool.  It is a pool for hard-core college basketball fans as well as people who have never watched a game.

You need 16 people to do the pool.  After the teams are announced on Selection Sunday you take the 64 teams (the teams in the play in games are both grouped in one team slot) and split them into 4 groups.  The groups below are the following:
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#13 – #16 seeds - Low
#9 – #12 seeds - Mid-Low
#5 – #8 seeds - Mid-High
#1 – #4 seeds - High

Look at the image below (it is from a previous March Madness year) to get an idea of how the teams are divided in groups.

Each of the 16 people in your pool each get a team out of the 4 groups listed above.  You could put the teams in 4 hats and do a random draw or you could use a computer to generate the pics.  It is a fair pool, since everybody ends up with a low, mid-low, mid-high, and high seed.  If one of your 4 teams is the winner of the NCAA Tourney, you win the pool.
 For this pool, I used the old school method of cutting out the 64 teams and grouping them in the 4 seed groups.  Some years I have used my 2010 Duke national championship cups :) to shake up the pieces of paper and draw out each person's picks at random.  See pic below.

We here at Duke Report have created the pool with myself @Skeelow22,   Josh @joshuacox and 14 Twitter friends/followers who responded to a request to join.  Below are the results of the random selections for the 2024 Duke Report - Unique March Madness Pick 'Em Pool.

The last 2 years I even added a snake draft style (pic above as you can see with the arrows marked by a sharpie)  to mix it up as I randomly chose teams from the cups.

As you can see, this is a unique office pool.  I myself take a sharpie and scratch out the teams as they are eliminated from the tournament.  There is no better feeling as a Duke fan than marking out North Carolina from the pool as they get eliminated.  With Selection Sunday already completed, this is another pool you can do along with filling out the brackets.

Winner of the Duke Report - March Madness Pick 'Em Pool will receive a small Duke prize. 

Enjoy March Madness and Go Duke!