Online Fantasy Basketball: NCAA Tournament

The NCAA Tournament is not only the most popular college basketball event of the year, it is a great opportunity for online fantasy sports enthusiasts to expand their horizons. Breaking away from traditional fantasy sports like online fantasy football and online fantasy basketball, fans get a chance each March to compete in a variety of ways. If you’re between fantasy sports seasons, and you have the itch to play, here are a few ways you can get involved in NCAA tournament fantasy basketball.

The old NCAA Tournament office pool is one of online fantasy basketball’s biggest traditions. Most people play, if they like competition and gambling. Many people who participate in bracket pools know little or nothing about college basketball. It’s very easy to play. Just grab a printable bracket off the Internet. Run some copies, and distribute them around your office. Decide how much your entry fee will be. No need to get carried away with the entry fee, as this might scare people away from your pool; plus, you don’t want to turn your pool into a wild Las Vegas casino party. It should be fun. Be sure to distribute your brackets the day after teams are selected, usually the second Sunday in March. The tournament begins the following Thursday at about 1:00 PM EST, so set your turn-in time prior to this.

Play is easy. Participants pick winners throughout the bracket . You can weight each round if you wish, or you can simply go by total wins (a point system helps eliminate ties). Have participants predict the total points in the championship game as an additional tie-breaker. If you don’t want the hassle of copying brackets and totaling each participant’s points (a huge task, if you’re in a big office), there are online services that will do it for you for a small fee. If you use a service with a fee, just build the cost into your entry fee.

If you want to stay away from running a bracket pool, you might consider an NCAA lottery. It doesn’t get any easier than this. When online brackets come out the Sunday evening of selection day, print one so you’ll have a list of teams participating. Cut out each team name (you may want to type them up or inflate them on a copier). Put them all into a hat, and have anyone who wants to participate throw in an entry fee and pick teams from the hat. If you have 16 people playing, they will each get four teams, because there are 64 teams in the NCAA Tournament. You might consider placing the teams in different hats, based on their seeds. This would eliminate the possibility of someone picking all low seeds (these teams have less chance to win) and someone else getting four high seeds. Some people simply wait until two rounds are played and the tournament is down to 16 teams. You can decide how you want to decide the winners. Obviously, the person who selects the national champion should get the most money. Just decide how many places you want to pay beyond that. Like your bracket pools and other games, a lottery-style pool can also be played in an online fantasy basketball format.

If you are a true online fantasy basketball lover, this is the game you’ll want to play. The biggest constraint with a draft league is you have to have either eight or 16 people to make the league interesting. Much like a Fantasy Football Draft, NCAA Tournament draft participants will be given a random draft order, which will alternate each round. If you select first in round one, you’ll pick eighth in round two and then first again in round three and so on. Each team is given a point value for wins based on the team’s seed. Teams seeded one through four might get just one point per win, because they are expected to win, or you may decide to give one point to seeds one and two and two points to seeds three and four. As the league commissioner, you can decide the point value or ask participants how they want the system to work. The strategy is to try to draft teams you feel have a good chance to win with the most points per victory. If your league gives three points per win to a number five seed, and you select one that wins just two games, this team is much more valuable than a top seed, even if the number one seed advances to the final four. Draft leagues are much more challenging than bracket pools.

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