The slumping American economy has produced an 8.2% unemployment rate as we head into the month of March and companies are praying that things don’t get any worse. However, March Madness is just a few weeks away from sweeping the country and According to the Chicago-based Challenger, Gray and Christmas Inc., American companies will lose approximately $3.8 billion dollars in lost productivity due to the NCAA tournament. That number is calculated from 58 million workers spending an average of 13.5 minutes online for each of the 16 business days of action. With the average wage at $18 per hour, those 13.5 minutes cost companies $4.05.

The NCAA basketball tournament has earned its title of March Madness, as 41% of Americans and more than 58 million U.S. workers are college basketball fans. With March upon us, the NCAA Basketball tournament is weeks away and just about everyone is watching the games a little closer while trying to find their sleeper, or Cinderella team, for their office bracket pools. Researchers found that almost a third, 27%, of American employees participate in March Madness office pools. The majority of these workers are men, as only 8% of American women have participated in the workplace pool. Surveys show that almost half of them spend at least a half hour at work to fill out their winning picks. They might just be office pools, but even with a slumping American economy, bracket pools usually range from $5 to $25 per person, making them total an incredible $2.5 billion dollars!

That's an incredible number considering that Vegas has received between $80 and $90 million dollars bet on the College games in Nevada casinos. According to online sources, Americans wager between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion on the NCAA tournament via online Sportsbooks.

The 64-team March Madness Tournament begins on March 15 with Selection Sunday. CBS.com is capable of handling up to 300,000 viewers to watch video streams of games online at any given time, and their target audience is office workers. Two seasons ago, college-basketball related Web traffic was heaviest during the first week of the tournament, when 7.9 million people logged on to the top Web sites. With high-speed Internet access common in many offices, the urge to keep tabs on favorite teams is becoming more difficult to resist.

Bosses understand that they have employees who care about March Madness and are going to be paying attention to the games whether or not it's allowed. However, with the unemployment rate rising with each passing month, employees might watch just how much tournament talk they’re involved in during work hours. When employees clock out of the office, they head home to continue their action. On average, 7.6 million households are tuned in during each telecast, and each telecast lasts about 2.5 hours. It all adds up to 494 million hours of television. With 64 games played and two possible results for each game, the total number of possible outcomes for the tournament is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616!

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