For the first time in the many years of tracking the winners and losers in the annual men's college basketball playoffs, I haven't had to scour the sports page and then manually enter the names and scores in my tournament bracket in order to see how my picks performed. This year Adobe and ESPN took the work out of that task by developing the rich-media Ultimate Tourney Guide that features -- among other advanced PDF capabilities -- self-updating brackets.
So I'm ready for the upcoming round of 16 without touching a pen to paper -- I just checked my personalized bracket that I created online prior to the tournament to see which of my teams are still in the chase. Where I had selected a team that lost, my losing choice is highlighted in red, with the winning team's name entered neatly above.
Of course at this early stage, picking most teams by their seeding is generally a safe bet. The real upsets are yet to happen. So far, so good, my bracket reveals -- with a few exceptions.
If you didn't create an ESPN bracket prior to the start of the tournament, you obviously can't enter the sports network's Tournament Challenge contest now. But you can find out how this entertaining and informative PDF document was developed by reading the five-part series by Joel Geraci, Acrobat technical evangelist, in his PDF Developer Junkie blog. Parts one through three of "How We Did It" are now available, with two more to come.
The championship game will be played April 6.