Getting Organized For March Madness

Yes, I know it’s several weeks away, but the NCAA tournament is coming soon. And, like last year, I plan on hosting a tournament Pick ’em on this site (announcement and banner ad to follow). I’m trying to get organized ahead of time here, and what I need is input from everybody on the following:

• Prizes: We had a couple prizes last year (and I’ve already email folks who contributed last year to see if they wanted to contribute again), but if anybody reading this owns a business that wants some free advertising or has something that they’d like to throw into the prize pool, e-mail me at utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com or comment here. I’m hoping to get enough prizes to offer something other than just a first place prize, and I’d like to be able to award a prize for filling out an entire bracket and scoring dead last (as that’s a feat in its own right).
• Scoring: I’ve set up my group on Yahoo!’s tournament pick ’em site, and one of the options they had this year was the ability to customize scoring. Traditionally, scoring has broken down so that correctly picked first round games are worth 1 point, second round picks are worth 2, third are worth 4, fourth are worth 8, 16 point for the 5th, and 32 points for the championship. However, you can adjust the scoring where every game is worth the same single point (so all games would be the same value), or set it up so that games are worth whatever round they’re in (3rd round games are worth three points, 4th are worth 4, etc…). You can also setup your own scoring system (I’m thinking the Fibonacci sequence, minus zero). I’m tempted to change up the scoring a bit this year to make it more interesting all around, but wanted to get everybody’s input first.
• Anything Else? If you have any other ideas, feel free to send them my way.

So expect a banner ad up near the BendBroadband ad, plus an announcement forthcoming, once I get things better organized.