Hey, all you sports ball fan people!  It's the greatest time of the year again!  It's the time when small packs of college kids try their darndest to appear in a Luthor-Vandross highlights reel!

If I've already captured your interest, that's great!  If not, and you're saying, I thought you were the CRYPTO Idiot, not just a regular idiot... then WAIT, what if I told you there IS a crypto angle to this post?

First, since I personally am a college hoope junkie, let's get the traditional stuff out of the way first.  People have been filling out brackets since the stone age, when Thogg U defeated Bedrock Technical in a thrilling 3-2 victory, aided by a bench-clearing, club-wielding brawl at the end of the game.  Warren Buffet even offered a Billion dollar prize several years back to anyone who got a perfect bracket, and I was OH SO close - only missed about 50 picks!

This year, we have our usual assortment of bracket sites that offering traditional cash prizes:

CBS Sports is offering tickets to the 2023 Final Four (And really, who wouldn't want to win that just for the dream vacation to scenic Houston?)

ESPN is giving away $100K in their sweepstakes (Everyone is warmly invited to join my ESPN pool - look for the group March_Mathness)

Yahoo is giving away $25K to anyone who picks St. Peter's College to make it to the Final Four (Just kidding about the criteria - but not the prize!)

DraftKings has a pretty nifty looking March Mania Survivor Pool going on, that puts a little twist on the traditional Tournament pick 'em game.  You pick one winner in each round, but be careful, you can only pick a team once through the entirety of the contest!

And now, on to the crypto adjacent options, for all you guys champing at the Bitcoin...

Overtime sold 2,500 blockchain passes to users who will be sent a March Madness bracket NFT later this week.  Like bingo cards at your grandmother's favorite funeral home, no two of these bracket NFTs are the same, as they will each have a different combination of winners moving up the ranks.  The 100 owners with the most succesful brackets at the end of the real-life tourney will split $100K in prizes!  Now you may be thinking - Damn, I feel bad for the fellow who got the randomized bracket with Colorado State, Akron, Colgate, and Rutgers as a Final Four!  But here's the thing - people will be buying and selling these NFTs once the tournament gets started.  So even if you have a crappy bracket - nay, even if you didn't GET a bracket - you can still put your crypto where your smashmouth is and get in on this!

On a similar note, here's a contest that lets you mint your own bracket then buy, trade, and sell your brackets, with 100% of all proceeds going to help Ukraine!  I haven't filled out a bracket here yet, but I will be looking into it shortly!

Altoira is having their own bracket tournament, but not with round balls, but rather with alt coins (and a few blue chips as well).  In their Sweet Crypteen, They're stacking 16 of your favorite coins up against one another, and your job is to choose a winner for each matchup.  It's fun, it's easy, it could net you $5K.  Whatta ya got to lose? 

I've never heard of POLYX, but who knows, it could be the next Ethereum, or tomorrow's Fantom, or possibly next week's ElonShibaDogTurd... But at any rate, the team is giving away THOUSANDS of it to whoever wins their bracket challenge... which does appear to be a sub-group of the earlier mentioned Yahoo bracket challenge, but still.  You going to turn your nose up at the possiblity of free crypto?

I haven't even delved into all of the PAID contest available at betting sites, online casinos, and hole-in-the-wall Slovakian pizza joints!  Hopefully you get all the action you want this tournament season.  And if you know of any other fun contests/tournaments/games related to March Madness, let me know in the comments!

Remember, this is not financial advice, it's just dumb blathering!

If you like my writing, please consider tipping me here and leaving a comment, and if you want to read even more, check out my books on Amazon!  The first one is called Learn Me Good, and it's all about rookie teacher Jack Woodson who goes through a baptism of fire after leaving his engineering job and teaching a rowdy group of third graders.