Many people believe the Super Bowl has become a national holiday, and in a way, they’re right. Each year friends and family gather around the television set for a day of eating, drinking and screaming, much like Christmas and Thanksgiving.

But the problem with Super Sunday is that it falls on a day of the week where most people don’t work anyway. As any good union member or government employee will tell you, what’s a holiday without a day off from work? That’s why for my money, March Madness is the true American sporting holiday, a month long celebration where worker productivity dips lower than the President’s approval rating.

Raise your hands. Who out there has ever participated in a March Madness pool or worked at a company that ran one? That 90% of you with your hands in the air, go throw on some deodorant and start studying your brackets. You only have until noon Thursday. The rest of you pay attention. I’m here to help.

First, get a real job. Any company worth its weight will have at least one employee shirking his responsibilities to pass out and collect brackets, those white sheets of paper with lots of little lines containing the names of 65 colleges written so small you’d swear your local optometrist is sponsoring the tournament. The winner of the pool and the prize money is the person who fills in the most lines correctly along the way to picking the champion. Of course in more unscrupulous places, the winner might also be the person who runs the pool and is therefore able to manipulate the results, but that’s a story for another day.

There really is no sure-fire formula for winning one of these things, but there are four categories most contestants fall into. I’ll list them in descending order of their chances;

Number one is the “Sports Geek.‿ This is the guy who can name every player on the Oral Roberts roster, but hesitates if you ask him the name of his 3-year old daughter. The next category is the “Educated Guesser.‿ That’s the person who’s somewhat knowledgeable about college basketball, but actually takes a night off from watching it on TV to celebrate a loved one’s birthday.

The third is the “Clueless Co-Worker.‿ The size of the jackpot is completely dependant on how many of these poor saps the person running the pool can sucker into sacrificing their hard earned money in the name of “office spirit.‿ Only rarely will someone from this category win the pool, but there’s almost always one or two who do better than the “Sports Geek‿ and the “Educated Guesser,‿ thus leading to a few chuckles around the water cooler.

The final category is the “Sports Blogger.‿ That’s the idiot who enters year after year, convinces himself he really has a chance, then watches in horror as by the first weekend, his bracket has more “X’s‿ than Jennifer Lopez.

So please forgive me if this year, I save myself the trouble of filling out those stupid brackets. Instead, I’ll sit back and enjoy the games, rooting for the underdog every step of the way. In the process, maybe I’ll remember that March Madness got its name from the unpredictable basketball games, and not from the anger I feel when ripping my entry to shreds.

What category do you fall into? Have you ever won a March Madness pool? And what’s your Final Four this year? Hop online and tell us what you think!