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    Facebook Contest Lets You Pick the NCAA's March Madness Field

    By Sam Laird | Mashable – Wed, Feb 1, 2012

    The NCAA's popular March Madness basketball tournament is annually a cause of groans from know-it-all fans who think they they could have done a better job of picking its teams. But this year via Facebook, the NCAA is giving fans a chance to show that they could, indeed, make better selections.

    The NCAA's Super 10 contest will select a committee of ten hardcore fans and social media enthusiasts to learn about the process and create their own field of 68 teams before the official committee releases its own picks.

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    The winning entrants will be flown to Atlanta, given an in-depth primer on how teams are selected for the tournament and then turned loose to make their own picks. Fans enter by submitting a 30-second video pitch on why they should be selected to the March Madness Facebook page. NCAA representatives will then select contestants who exhibit the right combination of hoops knowledge and social media savvy. Then a Facebook fan vote will determine the final group of 10.

    Fans have until 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday to enter the contest.

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    "Everyone thinks they know basketball and they think it's so easy to choose the field, so we thought, 'Why don't we do a cross between dream-job and prove-what-you-know?" Ronnie Ramos, the NCAA's managing director of digital communications told Mashable.

    Ramos said that the Super 10 is the NCAA's first major Facebook contest, but that the "marriage of sports and social media is a really strong one because of all the fan excitement that surounds sports."

    The fan committee's picks will be posted to the NCAA's March Madness Facebook page and the NCAA website an hour before the official field is announced.

    "It's going to be fun to put a group of passional basketball fans together and see how their selections compare the official committee's," Ramos said.

    Will you enter this contest? Let us know in the comments.

    Image courtesy of iStockphoto, adamkaz.

    This story originally published on Mashable here.

     

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