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By SARAH MORGAN
1. "We're the reason nobody got anything done last week."
Gavin Landry isn't a big pro basketball fan, but he loves college hoops -- especially March Madness, the NCAA's three-week tourney to crown the best team in all the land. "College basketball is basketball in its purest form," he says. And since starting a hotel-industry consulting business in 2008, Landry says it's gotten a lot easier for him to watch the games while at work. "Being my own boss and having the ability to be a little flexible allows me a lot more time to do that kind of thing," Landry says.
For those of us with less freedom at the office, catching daytime games is a little trickier not that we're letting that stop us. American workers were projected to spend a total of almost 8.4 million hours watching March Madness games online at work last year, up 20% from the previous year, with most of that video streaming occurring the first two days of the tourney. Given that the average hourly wage for a private-sector worker is $22.87, the consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas estimated that all those lost hours would cost employers more than $192 million this month.
Thank (or blame) the boost in viewership partly on CBSSports.com's new free mobile apps, as well as the fact that a greater number of games are being streamed online and more workers have access to high-speed internet connections at work than ever before, says James Pedderson, a spokesman for Challenger.