March Madness {Fantasy Land}

Are you tired of the same old March Madness pools with the same old coworkers and friends?

Maybe you are tired of losing every year with the same strategy, or maybe you are looking for other ways to “invest” in your March Madness knowledge. You don’t have to explain your reasoning to us; this isn’t a family dinner or Gamblers Anonymous. Point is, brackets aren’t the only way to compete in March. You can join pools or fantasy leagues!

Here are a few other outside the regular bracket ideas for March Madness contests.

1) The Points Pool

Consider this your most basic, and actually most fun fantasy league. There is only one category: POINTS. You draft a team of players competing in the tournament with the goal of getting the most points by the final buzzer of the final game. The farther into the tournament your player gets, the more likely he is to score, and when your player gets knocked out, no more points.

You can customize your pool with extra rules regarding drafting players from different seeds or regions, but The Points Pool requires very little explanation or constitution at its most basic level. Simplicity is part of why The Points Pool is so much fun.

Bonus: If watching games with friends in The Points Pool and your player scores, the most fun thing you can do is cheer, “POINTS POINTS POINTS” in all of their faces. It’s so obnoxious that it goes all the way around the world and back to the other side of unobnoxious. They’ll get into it. You’ll get into it. No matter where you are, the whole bar will get into it.

2) Knockout Pool (AKA Suicide Pool AKA Survivor Pool)

You may have been in one of these during the NFL season. Essentially you need to pick just one team to win every day of March Madness games, without repeating your pick. If your team loses or you run out of teams to pick, you are knocked out. Last person standing wins.

This may seem like an easy pool to win, until you are three hours into day one and Michigan State is down six to South Dakota State and you are sweating out a game you otherwise didn’t care about on a Thursday afternoon. FUN! In a tournament where Cinderellas and upsets are so common, get ready for a case of the unnecessarily stressful 2-seed scaries.

3) The Seed Game

You pick one school (of four) from every seed. That is now your team for March. Every time your school wins a game in the tournament, you get the number of points equal to their seed. So if you picked UMBC last year, you earned 16 points when they beat Virginia in the first round.

This pool really rewards knowing which mediocre teams are poised to make a big run. If you picked Villanova as your 1 seed, you earned six points, one for each of their six wins en route to the title. But if you’d picked Loyola-Chicago as your 11-seed (remember Sister Jean?!?!) you would have earned 44 points for their four games won.

4) The Women’s Bracket

And I’m not just saying that because The Prompt is a Title IX, woke PC bro-affiliated web magazine, run by the liberal socialist-cuck left. This year’s women’s tournament could be one of the most exciting ones in recent years. UCONN will not be the presumptive or overwhelming favorite, and won’t be the overall first seed for the first time in seven years.

UCONN ranked fifth in February, and fourth in March when the tournament committee revealed their bracket previews. Even though they haven’t lost since, the Huskies’ two losses this season are more than they’d accumulated in the previous five regular seasons. There are a lot of individual stars playing for some underdog teams, and any one of them could go off and shake up an entire region.

My pick: Iowa Hawkeyes and superstar Megan Gustafson.

5) Team Auction

This straightforward game requires a group of players to bid real dollars on each of the 64 teams in the tournament (or 68, if you’re so inclined). The total pot taken in from every team can be divided as you choose, either with it all going to the grand champion, or given mostly to the winner, with other payouts for Final 4 or runner up.

This pool can get especially crazy if a few big bidders drive up the one-seeds.

Remember, just like there has never been a perfect bracket recorded, there are no solely correct ways to enjoy March Madness. Good luck and, as always, Fuck Duke.