10 Things NCAA Basketball Won't Say

Sarah Morgan
WSJ

1. We're the reason nobody got anything done last week.

Gavin Landry isn't a big pro basketball fan, but he loves college hoops – especially March Madness, the NCAA's three-week tourney to crown the best team in all the land. "College basketball is basketball in its purest form," he says. And since starting a hotel-industry consulting business in 2008, Landry says it's gotten a lot easier for him to watch the games while at work. "Being my own boss and having the ability to be a little flexible allows me a lot more time to do that kind of thing," Landry says.

For those of us with less freedom at the office, catching daytime games is a little trickier – not that we're letting that stop us. American workers will likely spend a total of almost 8.4 million hours watching March Madness games online at work this year, up 20% from last year, with most of that video streaming occurring last Thursday and Friday – the first two days of the tourney. Given that the average hourly wage for a private-sector worker is $22.87, the consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas estimates that all those lost hours will cost employers more than $192 million this month.

Thank (or blame) the boost in viewership partly on CBSSports.com's new free mobile apps, as well as the fact that a greater number of games are being streamed online this year and more workers have access to high-speed internet connections at work than ever before, says James Pedderson, a spokesman for Challenger.

2. We make loads of money…

The players may be amateurs, but the NCAA men's basketball tournament is big business – second only to the Super Bowl in terms of ad sales for a postseason sporting event. A thirty-second commercial during one of the last two rounds of the tournament costs around $1.2 million, far more than a $440,0000 spot during the World Series, and more than three times the cost of an ad during the NBA championship, according to Kantar Media, a research firm. Those high prices are partly due to the tournament's "protected" spot on the calendar, "a three-week window of time where it is the focal point of the sporting world," says Jon Swallen, a senior vice president of research with Kantar Media. And while ratings for head-to-head matchups like the World Series can vary widely depending on the size of the teams' fan base, March Madness always has national appeal, Swallen says.

(More here.)