While college basketball teams wrap up their regular season, every fan is preparing for the tournament: including employees. Companies frantically create office pools after the sixty-eight teams are announced; the die-hard fans bring in their favorite team’s merchandise to decorate their cubicles and most importantly bookmark ncaa.com/ondemand on their computers. It is a plague that sweeps the nation and ultimately has a damaging affect. The effect that it creates in the workplace is not only harmful to the companies that participate but also to the economy in the long run.

The fall of the companies that participate and the economy begin with the infamous national bracket day held on March 14th. Employees spend an average of two hours filling out their brackets but the hours of productivity lost only get higher. As the tournament goes on, employees focus more on the games and their brackets than they do their actual job. Resulting in a total of 8.4 million hours lost due to the tournament. In this type of economy, the people who do not have jobs would be more than happy to step in and get paid for those hours. Maybe, if that happened, our country wouldn’t lose as much money as it does in the month of March.

To be more specific, America roughly loses anywhere from $192 million to over $1.8 billion, depending on the year. When 59% of our workforce is busy drooling over who has racked up the most points in a game, it is obvious that it is possible to lose that much. Some people may argue that we could lose much more but why would a person say that? There is such a thing called jinxing something and when we are already trillions of dollars in debt, I do not think that is something that needs to be jinxed.

So March Madness may be the greatest part of a fan’s year but that does not change the fact that it is ultimately ruining the country we call home. America is going millions and even sometimes billions of dollars in debt due to the three week period in March. We are trying to get rid of our debt not just tackle some more junk onto it. Maybe if employees were more responsible and could separate their play from their work, America could be on the conveyer belt to success. Then if that happened, families would not have to worry about making sure there is food on the table every night. Once that crisis is solved, America would in fact be a happier country and eventually another booming period would occur. The simplest solution to damage that has already occurred would be applying stricter rules to companies during the time of March Madness in the future. Just think if every employee was doing what they are supposed to during March Madness, America would be making anywhere from $192 million to over $1.8 billion extra.