It happens every year, like clockwork. The NCAA basketball tournament begins, triggering frenetic activity in  workplaces across the country.

I don't mean the typical office betting pools, where employees try their hand at predicting the outcome of college basketball games involving teams they know nothing about, other than their records and where they're seeded. I mean in the offices of public-relations companies trying to persuade media outlets to give their clients some free publicity warn businesses about the huge loss in employee productivity caused by illegal wagering and game-watching!

Here's one email I received the other day, with all identifying elements removed:

With march madness in full swing, companies are set to lose over $1 billion in lost employee productivity. With employees spending an average of 13 minutes a day looking at scores and streaming games to their computers, IT administrators will face an increase in email traffic, network bandwidth management issues and a rise in potential network security breaches. To help ease this IT headache, IT managers should seek  to tighten email security and closely monitor bandwidth, making a decision early on whether to ban streaming or not, in addition to ensuring that their security solutions are correctly configured.

First, 90% of the employees who were interested during the first weekend of the tournament don't care anymore because their first-round bracket is in tatters, their bold underdog picks back on their respective campuses, binge drinking and watching the Sweet Sixteen on TV along with the rest of us.

Second, how exactly do we arrive at this "over $1 billion in lost employee productivity" figure? I'm sure it was chosen because it's a nice, round alarming number, but there are some shaky assumptions built into it. For example, maybe that 13 minutes a day that employees allegedly average looking at scores and streaming games is coming out of YouTube, blog and porn time. So that'd be a wash. Plus, $1 billion really isn't that much -- it's not like you can buy an investment bank or anything with that kind of cash. Well, not without a little help.

Third...actually, I don't have time for a third item. I just got pinged about a new ESPN podcast on Xavier. Gotta go.