1. You get an email from your college alumni association informing you that your school’s men’s basketball team is in the semifinals for their national championship. You are …
a) Not surprised, because you’ve been following them all season (and every season since your freshman year).
b) Surprised to learn that the school even has a basketball team, and delighted that they’re in the March Madness semifinals.
c) Not surprised, because the email went straight to your spam folder.
2. March Madness is:
a) The annual NCAA men’s college basketball championship tournament.
b) The annual NCAA Division 1 basketball championship tournament. Because the NCAA is divided into divisions, each of which has its own separate championship, and being in the Division 3 semifinals means you’re not even in March Madness, much less the semifinals, whose participants haven’t even been determined yet.
c) Similar to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), in that both are afflitions in which a person’s mood is influenced by a spherical object — in SAD, under-exposure to the Sun contributes to depression; in March Madness, over-exposure to a basketball contributes to mood swings.
3. You would use a March Madness bracket to:
a) Record your predictions regarding who will win each game of the March Madness tournament.
b) Hang your March Madness curtains.
c) Determine what percentage of your March Madness income you need to pay in your March Madness taxes.
4. If I showed you a picture of a basketball, a bowling ball, a mothball, a hairball, an eyeball, and Lucille ball, the probability that you’d be able to correctly identify the basketball is:
a) 17%
b) 110%
c) No one told me there would be math in this quiz.
5. You discover that your office has a weekly pool in which people predict the winners of that week’s March Madness games. You decide to join in because:
a) You have a really good system for predicting March Madness winners.
b) The pool goes by point spread, so in theory you’d have a 50-50 chance of choosing each winner correctly just by guessing randomly.
c) If you don’t, other people will be having fun without you, and the idea of that happening is just intolerable.
d) All of the above.
6. In your office pool, you choose the Jets to beat their long-standing rivals, the Sharks, by at least 9 points. The final score is Jets 73, Sharks 66. The next day:
a) You’re happy because the team you picked won their game.
b) You’re sad because the team you picked didn’t beat the point spread.
c) You’re devastated by the tragic loss of life that occurred during the huge dance number / knife fight that broke out after the game. Although you think you might be confusing this with a movie.
Answers: 1-b, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a, 5-d, 6-c.
Unlikely Explanations 
It’s a sad commentary on my inability to keep up with the whole concept of people I’ve never met playing children’s games for yearly salaries in the millions, but this is the first year I’ve ever realised that “March Madness” has anything to do with sports — much less basketball. Seriously. I’d always thought it was a marketing thing, like “Midnight Madness.”
PS: In any action between the Sharks and the Jets, I’ve got to go with the Sharks. The Jets are nothing but punks:
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It’s just our bringin’ up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we’re punks!
I actually thought about including something about allegations that a referee named Krupke showed favoritism towards the Jets, but I couldn’t make it work.
Your school just emails? Damn, I’m getting calls from mine and my son’s. I’m transferring.
I get lots of emails from them, plus exactly one phone call per year. And it just occurred to me that it might be possible to opt out of the phone calls.
I got all the answers wrong
I can identify the basketball…that’s it. And I’m ok with that.
Obviously I am NOT a golfer.
;)
Thank you. I’m now prepared for March Madness, my bowling bowl is polished and my knife is sharp.
Have you been practicing your dance moves? You’ll need those in the knife fight.
When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way… (Not in the mood for basketball, strangely, but more in the mood for West Side Story now.)
Last night I had that song in my head in a continuous loop, alternating with “a boy like that, he killed your brother…”.
LOL
What’s basketball? Just kidding. It’s the game that’s like hockey but with all the gangsters, right?
No, I think that’s hockey.
Sadly, I care so little about March Madness that I couldn’t even focus on your funny quiz. I leave it to the individuals reading this to decide if that means I fail or pass with flying colors.
Another good thing about working from home: I know more about basketball than any of my coworkers. #IWorkWithCats
The worst thing about working with cats is that they never make a fresh pot of coffee.
Right? Between that and The Boy not increasing the amount of coffee he makes in the morning now that I work at home…well, I’m seriously under caffeinated. Woe is me.
The only March Madness I care about is the one about maple syrup.
This quiz had more balls than I was expecting, but I can’t help but think that one set of balls is conspicuously missing. Or maybe I’m just feeling teste today.
Do you think this post comes across as too sterile? The first draft had more balls, but then I altered it.
I think Shakespeare said it best when he warned: “Beware the Ides of March Madness.” Although, there is something about this time of year that makes me feel pretty . Oh, so pretty. It’s a pity how pretty I feel.
It’s nice to feel pretty, isn’t it? Personally, I feel charming. It’s alarming how charming I feel. But mostly I feel like I have 360 days to come up with a post worthy of the awesome title “Beware the Ides of March Madness”.
Oh basketball… eyes. glazing. over. All those squeaky shoes on hardwood floors! All those replays looking exactly the same!
On the upside, there were pictures of balls in this post, and the 7-year old boy in me had a good giggle. Balls are ALWAYS funny, even in February or April. ;)
I was going to say something with some innuendo about balls, and also say something about 7-year-old boys being my target demographic, but that combination turns out to be incredibly creepy.
Perhaps a little late, but I developed a March Madness bracket for those people that don’t have the time or energy to follow college basketball, but still wanted to feel like they were part of the “madness”.
http://themainland.net/have-you-filled-out-your-march-family-madness-bracket-yet/