During a brief study break, I encountered the “2006 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball bracket”:http://www.ncaasports.com/basketball/mens/brackets/viewable/2006/DI, which is exciting because my favorite, Nevada, otherwise known as University of Nevada, Reno (_not Vegas_!) won the WAC(Western Athletic Conference) yesterday after beating Utah State. I had hoped for a Georgetown win against Syracuse on Friday in the Big East semifinals, but they made a crucial mistake in the last few seconds to let Syracuse take away any shot at that conference title.

Anyway, what I really wanted to post about was something else I happened across over at “Newsvine”:http://www.newsvine.com/: the “Newsvine Tournament Pick ‘Em”:http://www.newsvine.com/_games/tournamentpickem2006/enter. Basically, you have a chance to win a free iPod just by picking the teams that will perform the best. You’re given so many points to dish out and “bet” on teams which are worth varied amounts based on their seed rank. With each win, you get a point, and the person with the most points wins.

The designers used some JavaScript to create a sweet interface that works great. Once your picks are saved, you can join one or more groups (up to five) to compare your picks against others. Pretty neat! If you are interested, please join me in my group, named *madness*, by entering keycode *463282*.

I’ve included a scaled screen shot of the interface below, with a few of my picks made. As you can see, as you run out of points (total of 300 given to each person), selections that are worth more points that you have available are grayed out. Slick!

My picks are not based on any real analysis, more just my gut feeling, what I’ve heard about, who I like, and who’s higher up in the rankings. I just don’t have the time to dig into the stats. Plus, there are bound to be some upsets: there always are.