Daily Dose of Excel

Bill Jelen, aka Mr. Excel, is sponsoring a pool for the NCAA Basketball Championship Tournament. You may know it as the Final Four. I’ll be getting in, but I haven’t had time yet. I need Memphis to do well in my other pools, so I think I’ll hedge my bets and have them get beat early in this one. Or maybe I should just put all my eggs in one basket.

Mr. Excel’s Bracket

Did I mention it’s free? Just get your entry in by tomorrow night before the deadline.

I predict the Seattle Seahawks to win the SuperBowl by 14 points later today. Seattle will score two unanswered, first quarter touchdowns: One workman-like touchdown in which they will run Alexander and defeat Pittsburgh’s pass rush with short, high-percentage passes over the middle and in the flats; and one easy touchdown such as an interception or punt return. Pittsburgh will adjust their defense and the two teams will trade touchdowns and field goals the rest of the game, with the Steelers never getting closer than ten points behind.

Shawn Alexander will be named MVP with 162 rushing yards, 45 receiving yards, and one touchdown.

Seattle 30, Pittsburgh 16

It’s March. And in the US, that can only mean one thing: The huge gambling machine that’s been asleep since the SuperBowl is waking. There are basically two sporting seasons that I enjoy more than any. The first is college football (the one where you don’t use your feet) bowl season. The second is college basketball tourney time. These two stand out not because they are such great sports, but because I’m called on to create Excel spreadsheets to keep track of the action. It’s a sickness.

Microsoft has their own bracket template as well as a template to track the results. Pretty though they may be, they didn’t use any data validation. Who at Microsoft created these templates? Not someone who uses Excel much, I presume. In a standard bracket, the winners of the first 32 games are the participants in the next round of 16 games. This situation screams for in-cell dropdowns.

You can download the bracket spreadsheet that I use at 2005 Bracket.zip. It doesn’t have fancy shading or pictures of basketballs, but I might argue that it’s a little more functional than Microsoft’s offering.

Later this week I’ll post my results-tracking spreadsheet. I just need to clean it up for public consumption.

Larry points out that next year’s SuperBowl will by XL (=ROMAN(40) in Excel). Then I read the same thing on j-walkblog. In true Daily Dose style, I post the news only after everyone else on Earth has heard it.

Based on the comments at j-walkbog, and other experiences I’ve had, I conclude that people who like computers generally don’t like American football. I don’t know why, that just seems to be the way it is. I, for one, like football more than any other sport. I like college football more than professional, but I’d take the NFL over anything else.

I’ve been a Cincinnati Bengals fan since 1984-ish. If you follow the NFL at all, you know that I must be the most loyal fan of all time. (If you don’t follow the NFL, it’s because the Bengals had the worst decade (’90’s) in the history of football.) I started following the Bengals when Dave Rimington played followed a couple of years later by Jim Skow (they were my favorite Nebraska Cornhuskers at the time). I don’t want to be one of those guys who gives up on a team just because a certain player leaves, or the team has a couple of down years, or the team paints their helmets really funky.

In 2004, however, I decided that this was the last year for the Bengals. If they didn’t show some spark, I was giving up on them and finding a new team. Well, they did reasonably well and I actually think they’ll make the playoffs in 2005. Now I have to stick with them. There’s nothing better than having a team do well and being able to say “I’ve been a fan for years.”.

I watched a bit of the half time show, and I generally liked it. It may be the only half time show I’ve ever seen that I even liked a little, so I guess it was pretty good from my perspective. If I were Paul McCartney, I would insist that people not call me Sir. I’m sure it’s a big honor and all that, but it makes him seem pompous. It’s like someone who gets a PhD in philosophy and insists on being called ‘doctor’.

This would have been a better post if I would have said something funny about the football and Excel. But there simply isn’t anything funny about that combination.

Last Week:  1 for 5
YTD:  34 for 65

Last Week:  3 for 5
YTD:  33 for 60