The publicity-hungry folks at Challenger Gray and Christmas like to play fast and loose with numbers when we get close to NCAA basketball tournament time. This year, they project that employers face $1.7 billion in lost productivity from all those Web-surfing, bracket-building ingrates on the payroll.

If one takes the Challenger news releases seriously, one would think that workers are 41 percent  more basketball-crazy than they were a year ago, when Challenger estimated the productivity loss at $1.2 billion. But one would also think that hoops fever has dropped by half since 2006, when Challenger put the loss at $3.8 billion. The fact is, Challenger has no set methodology for calculating the loss, making the numbers no better than a wild guess.

This year’s figure assumes that, based on poll numbers, 37 million Americans will participate in office betting pools. It also assumes they’ll spend 10 minutes a day watching, reading about or talking about the games. At $17.50 an hour over 16 days, that comes to $1.7 billion. Oddly enough, last year Challenger was assuming that onyly 22.9 million workers would be caught up in March Madness, but it thought each of them would spend 13.5 minutes a day following the games. (Wages were also a bit lower last year.) I have no idea which set of numbers is closer to reality, but the shifting assumptions certainly don’t lend credibility to the whole exercise.

With my Drake Bulldogs in the tournament for the first time in 37 years,  I’ll confess that my personal productivity may drop just a bit. But, no, I’m not going to put a number on it.