King Kaufman's Sports Daily
The real culprit behind all that lost productivity at Tournament time. Plus: How USA baseball's failure is different from basketball's.
Read more: Sports, Baseball, Olympics, Race, Basketball, College Basketball, NCAA Tournament, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
March 15, 2006 | Have you started wasting your boss's money yet?
Are you working extra hard today, knowing you'll be pretty much checked out for the rest of the week because of the glorious first two days of the NCAA Tournament, or are you already poring over your bracket, trying to figure out if this will finally be the year when a 16 seed topples a 1?
As a firm believer in the theory that that will happen, and sooner rather than later, I say no, not this year. Sorry, Southern, Oral Roberts, Albany and Monmouth.
And sorry, Hampton, loser of Tuesday's dumb annual play-in game in Dayton, Ohio. As a conference champion you shouldn't have had to play that game. You should have had your ticket punched already while the last two at-large teams play the play-in, if someone has to, which they don't.
Sorry, but that Tuesday game just isn't part of the Tournament. The Tournament starts Thursday.
And you remember that annual report about how much the Tournament costs American business in lost production, the one this column took to the woodshed last year, debunking it, pantsing it, making it squeal like a pig before letting it scurry home?
It's back for more, and we seem to be in the throes of Brazil-like inflation.
Last year, Challenger, Gray and Christmas, the outplacement company that issues the bogus report as a publicity stunt, said American workers were costing their bosses $889.6 million in lost productivity by slacking to pay attention to the Tournament. That was a 16 percent hike from 2004, but we hadn't seen anything yet.
Thanks to Challenger, Gray's finding a new survey to hang its preposterous "findings" on, the new figure is $3.8 billion. That's billion with a B, as they say on TV.
That's 327 percent inflation! Get the hell back to work! Just reading this sentence, you're costing your boss $58. No, make that $112. Dang, it's $350 now!
No, I'm kidding. You're not costing your boss anything. Through the kind of exclusive, intrepid reporting that makes this column what it is, Salon has learned that the entirety of the $3.8 billion wasted by American workers at Tournament time is wasted by one person, Gerald Nanker of Evansville, Ind.