Bracket Reminder

If you've been meaning to get that bracket into the OTP Bracket Challenge and just never got around to it, it's now or never. Quite literally.

The curtain rises on the 09 edition of March Madness at noon on Thursday and your brackets have to be in by that time. It's that time of the year, boys and girls... a time to cut out of work and find a sports bar... a time to leach your company's bandwidth as you follow game after game on your work computer. Sure, it's a loss of productivity, but the economy is already in the shitter. What's 4 hours a day really going to hurt?

You should do this because the world of sports revolves around proving yourself to be smarter than the other jackass at the bar at 10am sucking down Jack and Cokes waiting for the games to start so you are assured a primo location at said bar while you choke down Nachos and wings and all other methods to slowly commit suicide one cheese filled deep fried bite at a time. So we hear. Fill out your brackets, OTPers, and feast on ball of the basket variety.

Introducing the OTP Bracket Challenge

Granted, we're a football blog, but like everyone else this time of year, we're catching basketball fever, spurned on in no small measure by the victories on Thursday by both the Kentucky Wildcats and the Cardinals of Ball State. Because of this said fever, as well as the pending lack of productivity known as March Madness, we've created the OverThePylon March Madness Bracket Pool, run by the good folks over at FunOfficePools.

Friends and readers of OTP are welcome to prove their intelligence and basketball savvy, and other blogs from around the interwebs, feel free to stake your reputation.

To enter the pool, here's what to do:

1. Go to the Fun Office Pools website and register for an account if you don't have it.

• Click here. (FunOfficePools.com if you can't get the link)
• If you're not automatically logged in, then sign in. (If you haven't used it before, create a new account. It's free.)

2. After logging in with your account you have or just created, go to the "Join a Pool" tab at the top.

• Select "March Madness 09" in the "Pool Type" box
• Type "OverThePylon" in the "Pool Name" box
• Leave the "Password" field blank
• Name your entry in the "Selection Name" box. Points for creativity. (This name you don't need to remember. It's simply the name of your team)
• Click "Join Pool"

3. Make your selections after the field is announced on Sunday. Picks have to be in by tip off of the first game on Thursday March 19.

If you've made it through all that and you're seeing a page with OverThePylon at the top, you're registered. Congrats. From that point forward it's simply a matter of gaining familiarity with the various pages and such on the menu of the left hand side of the page.

There's nothing fancy with Cinderella bonuses, picking upsets, so on and so forth. Pick a totally chalk bracket if you dare. You can sign up now, and make your picks later. Let's get it on, folks.

Bowl Pickin'

To spread some love amongst the blogosphere this Holiday Bowl Season, OTP participated in several Bowl Pick 'Ems spread across all sorts of formats. Some were with fellow BSU fans, others were hosted by sites or people we respect immensely in the blog scene. Here's how we fared:

Pool: Rocky Top Talk's
Hosted by: Rocky Top Talk, a fantastic Tennessee site that was one of the first sites on the net to link to us. Joel and crew do a fantastic job on all things blog related, and the team over there are some of the only UT fans we can stomach.
Record: 17-17
Results: 10th out of 47
Thoughts: Lost a 30-pointer on Bama and a 34-pointer on CMU, 25 and 26 on BYU and Troy respecitvely. Serves us right for picking our conference brethren and other mid-majors. RTT used FunOfficePools.com and I like the layout quite a bit.

Pool: BSUFans.com
Hosted by: Uh... bsufans.com
Record: 17-17
Results: 3rd out of 21
Thoughts: Same story as above. And we picked against Kentucky, which means something terrbile karmicly I'm sure.

Pool: Ja'Larry Bird's Disciples
Hosted by: Clay Travis, who if you're not reading on a semi-regular basis you are missing out on something. Go now.
Record: 20-14
Results: 58 out of 236
Thoughts: The largest pool we were in. Between Ball State, Troy, Texas Tech, and CMU, we lost 118 points. Thanks, BSU.

Pool: BHGP Championship
Hosted by: BlackHeartGoldPants, one of the funniest college football blogs on the net.
Record: 21-13
Results: 3rd out of 76
Thoughts: Texas Tech, Cincinnati, and Bama all screwed us in this one. This is one we were actually ahead in with 3 games to go.

So two bronze medals for us here at OTP. Huzzah!