King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Your March Madness slacking is costing your boss $889.6 million, a figure as shocking as it is bogus. Plus: Pool o' Experts devastated as usual by upsets.

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March 22, 2005 | Quit reading this. Get back to work. You only have two more days to get anything done before you start costing your employer $889.6 million again.

That's this year's estimate of what the NCAA Tournament will cost businesses nationwide in lost productivity, courtesy of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a career consulting company in Chicago that's better at self-promotion than it is at math. Last year's figure was $765.7 million.

If you're 16 percent less productive this March than last, you can blame improved real-time coverage on the Web, including streaming video.

The only conclusion to draw from this annual estimate is that Challenger Gray is good at getting its name in the papers, a not inconsiderable talent. We can also look at the way this estimate annually goes unchallenged in the vast majority of the media not produced by goateed caricatures and assume that a snappy press release can trump critical thinking more than occasionally.

The estimate is based on a pyramid of false assumptions.

There's no doubt that, looked at in a vacuum, the Tournament causes some lost productivity, though it makes up for at least some of that by acting as a team- and morale-builder in many companies where workers have fun and bond over office pools. Maybe it makes up for all of the lost productivity. Maybe it makes up for all of the lost productivity and then some.

I don't think it's possible to know, so we'll just ignore this effect, and the estimate is still out to lunch, as it were. Or at least in the break room, watching basketball.

Here's how Challenger Gray arrived at $889.6 million:

Websense, a Web filtering company, estimated in 2003 that college basketball fans spend 90 minutes a week, or roughly 13 minutes a day, looking at hoops-related Web sites. The average hourly pay for the American worker is $17.96, so the daily toll per worker is $3.89.

The NCAA estimates there are 14.3 million working people who consider themselves big fans, so that $3.89 multiplies out to $55.6 million a day in lost productivity. Multiply again for the 16 days of the NCAA Tournament and -- violin! -- we get $889.6 million.

It would be dishonest not to note that some of Challenger Gray's assumptions probably push the lost-productivity figure down. Given the advancements in Web technology in the last two years, if the average worker spent 13 minutes a day on basketball Web sites two years ago, he or she probably spends more time on them now. And more people follow March Madness than just "big fans."

Plus, I would guess that most workers spend more time surfing during the week, on the job, than at home on the weekends, when there are games to watch on TV, so the weekday average is probably a little more than one-seventh the weekly average.

Next page: The big daddy of all false assumptions. Plus: Pool o' Experts update