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It's getting crowded in the community pool

Think your office pool is going to be big?

Let's say you get the populations of Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater chipping into the pot. That wouldn't match the nearly 700,000 completed brackets collected in ESPN.com's free NCAA Tournament Challenge last year.

And before you break out your annual sob story of how you would have had $40 back in '95 if UCLA's Cameron Dollar hadn't gone off on Arkansas, meet Dan Kurtz.

The Woodland Hills, Calif., 24-year-old correctly predicted last year's Final Four, correctly picked Duke to beat Arizona in the final, and did fairly well in the final score tiebreaker. Kurtz had Duke winning 78-70, and the Devils won 82-72. Unfortunately for Kurtz, Colorado State senior Jeff Hinkle did just as well on his bracket and won ESPN's tiebreaker because his margin for Duke was 78-72.

Hinkle got $10,000. As for Kurtz, as Joseph Conrad would say, "Mister Kurtz, he disappointed."

This year, the ESPN jackpot is bigger: a $10,000 check, plus a 5-gallon Gatorade cooler and towel. The next-best 15 entries get the cooler and the towel, worth about $34.94. The rest of the best 64 get the towel.

If that doesn't send you cowering back to the shallow end of the local pool, ESPN has cruel, cruel statistics from last year's pickfest. Of 700,000 brackets, nobody had the Sweet 16 perfect: 1.6 percent had Gonzaga right, 1.2 percent had Temple, but all told, only six entries had 15 correct.

This isn't rocket science, but a little math says the odds on getting 15 right were roughly 1 in 100,000, the same odds calculated by a former NASA scientist last month as the chances of any U.S. resident suffering death by asteroid.

If you, like me, got a meager 10 of 16 last year, you're not alone, 190,461 did on ESPN.com, safely away from jackpots, towels and asteroids. More than 200 entrants did not pick any Sweet 16 team correctly.

Speaking of long odds, CNNSI.com trots out its $1-million Bracket Challenge in which getting all 63 games right is statistically up there with the chances of a former NASA scientist suffering death by asteroid. If you read the fine print, it's $1-million split equally among everyone who gets all 63 right.

If you like that, go ahead and file the same picks at Sportsline.com, where the Brackets Challenge will pay $10-million for a perfect bracket, or $1-million if you get just one wrong. They're splitting the pots for ties, too, but they'll give $25,000 to their overall winner, that is, assuming that bracket hasn't already won $10-million.

Other contests with kinder odds and fewer prizes include Sportingnews.com's Beat My Bracket, which awards a PC, DVD and camcorder to its winner; and Sunshinenetwork.com's Pick 64 contest, which has a big-screen TV or (gasp) electronic dartboard up for grabs.

TID-BYTES: The Arena Football League season doesn't start until April 3, but the Storm's official site, tampabaystorm.com, is in midseason form. A Web exclusive half-hour weekly radio show with coach Tim Marcum launched last week, and if you buy season tickets online, you get a free Marcum bobblehead doll. ... Bucs players Warren Sapp and Derrick Brooks can't be too happy to see their official sites (big99.com and hit55.com), produced by Tampa's bigpros.com, have nothing to do with the players but instead show search engines with prominent links to sports gambling sites. Mark Robinson of Bigpros.com said the company that renews their registrations did not do so, and a Hong Kong man took over the sites for his search engines. Bigpros has been in contact with him to resolve the issue and said the sites will return to normal "any time now."

-- If you have a question or comment about the Internet or a site to suggest, e-mail staff writer Greg Auman at auman@sptimes.com.

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