Recent News

If you are a winner, and you did not get an email from me asking your address, your check is in the mail as of today. You should get it this week, it's coming from Fifth Third Bank.

Thanks everyone for getting your payments to me quickly.

I have just sent out an email reminder to everyone who has not yet paid or hasn't made arrangements to pay. If you fit that description, please go ahead send and your payment in. Do it right now.

Your payment must be postmarked by March 24th (that's this Thursday, two days from now) or your entries will be removed from the pool by the money goon. Additionally, if you fail to pay for your entries, you could be required to pre-pay next year or you may not be invited back.

To the rest of you who have either already sent your payments or have made other arrangements to pay: thank you! You rock!

Thanks everyone for making this year one of our biggest yet. As of tipoff on Thursday, we have 243 entries and a pot of $729 up for grabs.

Of course, these numbers can (and will) drop as the payments do or do not come in. Remember: my "money goon" Mark Sickmiller will be enforcing our payment deadline this year and he can be quite harsh. Do not delay on sending in your payment! Payments must be postmarked by March 24th!

Good luck to everyone!

Just wanted to let everyone know that there are a couple of new features available this year. In past years, you could neither rename your entries after you created them nor delete them. Well, now you can. At least, until the deadline passes. After that, everything locks in.

Rename

There is an icon next to the each entry name on the My Entries page. (It looks like this: ) Click it to rename your entry.

Delete

There is an icon for each entry to delete it as well. (It looks like this: ) Click it to delete your entry.

I've received a few text messages over the past few days wondering if we'd be back this year. Well obviously we are. Welcome back!

Play-in Games

There are some changes to the tournament format this year. Specifically, the addition of three new play-in games. If you are interested in picking one of the play-in participants to win their game, you might want to wait until after the play-in games are played on Tuesday and Wednesday to make those final picks in your brackets.

Payments

Once again, my good friend Mark will be handling payments this year. Some of you might recall that he managed the payments two years ago. As part of my ongoing quest to make the payments smoother and fairer, there are some additional rules this year that Mark is going to help me with.

First is that payments must be postmarked by March 24th. That is the beginning of the second weekend of games and should give everyone plenty of time to get their payments in. If your payment is not made within that timeframe, your entries will be marked ineligible. This is not something I wanted to do, but for years, we've had people sending payments very late and some even never pay at all. I'd like to think that those people simply forgot, but it simply isn't fair to allow people to avoid payment or even wait to see how their brackets are doing before sending in payments.

The second rule I'm adding is a multi-year rule. If you enter the pool and fail to make payments for two years, I'll be asking you not to participate any more. Again, it might seem harsh, but it gets harder every year when I have to reduce the payouts and explain to the winners why they're getting less than they were promised.

Hopefully everyone understands these changes and will help Mark and I run the pool smoothly this year.

Thanks everyone and have fun!