To most of the population, March represents the beginning of spring and the end of winter. But to the sports community, March signifies the climax of the college basketball season with the NCAA tournament’s Final Four.

A key ingredient to enjoying the games for many college basketball fans is filling out the brackets. Everyone from Sports Illustrated to ESPN to CBS SportsLine have online brackets and competitions that give out prizes to those who correctly predict the results of the games.

In a year full of No. 1 seeds being upset and Cinderella stories, the results of this year’s Final Four tournament are more unpredictable than ever.

NIU alumnus Shawn Yeager said the unpredictability is a good thing for his bracket.

“I predicted a lot of upsets, so I’m doing very well. Some people in the pool are probably lying about how good they’re doing, but I don’t really care,” Yeager said.

Yeager said his pool is point-based, which means each correct guess about the winning team gets a predetermined point value. As the tournament gets closer to a winner, the points also increase accordingly. At the end, whoever has the most points wins the pool. Yeager said he did not put a lot of money in the pool, but he’s doing so well he wishes he had.

Students entering NCAA tournament pools are gambling more than their hard-earned cash – they also are taking the chance that they will face sanctions by the NIU Judicial Office.

“They are absolutely against the law,” NIU Judicial Director Larry Bolles said of the brackets. “There are millions of them across the country. There is nothing anybody can do to legislate those things out of existence. It is a part of our culture, and it is hard to change a culture.”

Bolles said enforcement is a rarity.

“The average pool is a bunch of people throwing a buck in at the office, and they are everywhere,” he said. “They are against the law, but we aren’t out looking for them. I’ve never had to discipline a student for something like that. We have never had a situation that occurred that called for it.”

Bolles said counseling would be the primary sanction for first-time offenders.

Senior biology major Jeff Smith said he knows a lot of people who are really in pools for the money aspect, but he participates for the fun of rooting for the underdogs.

“Filling out brackets really is a cultural phenomenon. Almost everyone I know is in a pool of some sort – either for money or just the entertainment,” Smith said.

Junior management major Lance Warren said he doesn’t think betting on the tournament should be illegal.

“I don’t see any harm in it,” he said. “If people want to throw away money, that’s their problem.”

Michael Calvert, president of Order of Omega, said enthusiasm for March Madness was not high enough for his organization’s planned fundraiser. The group, whose goal is to bring together the university’s fraternities and sororities, had to cancel its charity event, in which half of the proceeds would have been donated to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and the other half to a charity selected by the winner. It was canceled because of a lack of participation.