NCAA Tourney? Lost productivity?

King Kaufman wrote better about this study this year and last year, but this Challenger, Gray and Christmas study is a bunch of crap.

They claim the NCAA tournament will cost companies $3.8 billion in lost productivity this year. Look, I'm not going to deny that companies will lose some productivity, but $3.8 billion is ridiculous. I won't go into the numbers too much, but their methodology is terrible. They claim that many serious sports fans spend 90 minutes a week looking at NCAA related websites during the NCAA pool, but so what? It's a big assumption that they'd be spending that time doing something else productive. Perhaps they're just shifting the time they spend reading the Onion and playing games and taking shorter lunch hours, etc, to make up for the time. Maybe they're extra productive in the morning before the games start because they know their time will be wasted later in the day.

Besides I think there are only two days when the loss of production is really, truly, very significant... the first two days of the tourney. These are the only two days with games going on during normal work hours, and they're the only two days that everyone is still in their respective office pools.

Plus, aren't those office pools "team-builders" and "morale boosters?"