J3's March Madness Team Draft
Eight spots. Eight rounds. All 64 teams. Every March since 2012.
How It Works
Once the bracket comes out we snake draft the entire field. Eight entries, eight rounds, sixty-four teams, nobody left on the board. Play-in teams count as one pick, and you get whoever survives the play-in game.
* Each draft sets its own per point value.
Why Nobody Wants The 1 Seeds
A team scores its seed times the round for every game it wins. So a 1 seed that wins its opener is worth 1 point. A 9 seed that wins the same game is worth 9. Chalk pays badly and a live double-digit seed pays like a slot machine, which is why the first pick of the 2026 NGC draft was a 3 seed and Michigan, a 1 seed that went on to cut down the nets, sat there until pick 36.
| Round of 64 | 7 × 1 | 7 |
| Round of 32 | 7 × 2 | 14 |
| Sweet 16 | 7 × 3 | 21 |
| Elite 8 | 7 × 4 | 28 |
| Final Four | 7 × 5 | 35 |
| Championship | 7 × 6 | 42 |
| One team, one draft pick | 147 |
That single pick is still the biggest in the history of the pool. A 1 seed doing exactly the same thing is worth 21.
The Money
Everybody plays everybody. Each entry pays every other entry the difference in their points, at a dollar a point, which works out to eight times your points minus the pool total. Finish in the middle and you barely move. Draft the Cinderella and eight people pay you.
Where an entry is shared, the partners split it. Settling up happens on Venmo the week after the final.
Fifteen Years Of Receipts
Every draft, all the way down to who took which team with which pick. All-time standings, the biggest single picks, and the running tab. Each pool keeps its own books, so the names and the money sit behind that pool's password.
2027
Selection Sunday is in March. The draft goes a night or two later and runs until everybody has picked, same as always, and the plan is to run it right here on this site rather than on a rented one. Three pools this time, maybe more.