NCAA Tournament contest ideas

Has anyone tried something innovative with an NCAA Tournament contest in the print edition (not talking about a pool) and had it work well?

There is always the standard fill out the bracket contest with prizes but has anyone tried anything else that worked well or found a good way to make the bracket contest relatively simple to run?

 

We do the bracket thing, but we're small enough to run it through one of the websites (cbssportsline, yahoo, etc), so once you get them entered the major part of your work is done.

 

One thought would be that you could have people sign up to be in the contest, then take the first 68 that respond and randomly pull a team out of the hat. That reader gets that team for the tourney...have prizes for reaching the Final Four, Championship Game and winning the whole thing.

Little work on your part...you just have to record which team goes with which entrant. No thinking on the readers' part, and it gives them a team to cheer for.

Of course, you can replicate it five times and have 340 people entered if you'd like a bigger pool for the contest...maybe then make it prizes just for winners...so you'd only be giving out five prizes instead of 20.

 

Thanks

 

So, I was totally on board for stealing borrowing this idea. Then my editor asked me what happens if only 12 people sign up -- or 67 people or any number fewer than 68, and I didn't have an answer for her. I had anticipated how to handle getting too many responses, but too few is a bigger problem, especially if we get one of our advertisers to sponsor it.
Can anyone think of a good way to handle too few responses, short of calling the whole thing off?

 

Just take the number of people and give them extra teams if needed.

You get 34 people...each gets two teams...17 people each gets 4 teams, etc.

We've run a bracket tourney for about 10 years now and regularly get about 100 people signed up. We're a 10K circ...twice-weekly.

Never too soon to start promos for this thing...let people know it's coming and they'll be more likely to get involved.