March madness Productivity Loss

Tuesday marked the official opening of March Madness with the debut game between Morehead State and Alabama State. It also saw the opening games in the NIT as well as two other tournaments beginning with the letter "C" that I don't know what the initials stand for nor do I particularly care. One runner-up tournament is enough for me.

Today is the real opening of the tournament with games starting at noon. How many of you are planning to take extended lunch breaks to watch all or most the noon games or maybe even the entire afternoon slate. I know that when I was still working in an office, I never had as many fellow workers come to visit as I did on the first two days of the tournament since I had a TV in my office.

There are ridiculous numbers thrown around that purport to measure the productivity loss attributable to the NCAA tournament. One of the most fanciful is $3.8 billion contained in a press release by John A. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. As noted by Jack Shafer in Slate, this figure was reported by a long list of newspapers, many of whom won't be publishing print editions by the time that the next edition of March Madness rolls around, but that is a story for a different post. Shafer goes on to so an excellent job of skewering Challenger's numbers and I commend the article to you.