The horrible rapscallions in your HR department have blocked all your college basketball Web sites, and you blew through your sick days attending the Beer Pong Championships in Vegas. Worry not: there are iPhone/Touch apps that will allow you to go undetected while sneaking in a few hours of live games. Try these five solutions to not miss a moment of Mike Krzyzewski's receding hairline:


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CBS March Madness on Demand: This is the Swiss Army knife of March Madness apps, with access to tournament brackets, tip-off times, team comparisons, up-to-the minute scores, and (are you sitting down?) live video of every friggin’ game! Can we get a “Hell yeah!”? The navigation is smooth and intuitive, and if the video (which we obviously haven’t seen yet) is as good as billed, you’ll be more popular around the office than the boss’s secretary on Bikini Fridays.
Price: $4.99



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BracketCast NCAA 2009: This is the perfect cheat sheet for making your office pool picks. Powered by the Nostradamus of sports forecasting, AccuScore, this app provides statistics generated from over 10,000 simulations for every game (or so they claim), giving the likely outcome (with percentage of victory odds and even the final predicted score) of tournament match-ups before they happen. You can also play NCAA God by selecting upsets to see your team's odds of triumphing in the next round. Once games are actually played, BracketCast updates with results and new predictions for the next round. If this pocket fortune teller works in the first round, you can bet your sweet ass we're putting our bookie on speed dial.
Price: $0.99



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iBracket—March Madness Live Score Bracket Tracker: This is a real lazy man’s dream, so you can imagine how excited we were to learn that instead of re-entering our office pool picks, we could simply hijack them from already created online accounts. Import choices include Yahoo!, ESPN, CBS Sports and so on. However, there is one big problem. The brackets are in the wrong regions, so for example, the East bracket displays the Midwest bracket. WTF! Not good, but we still like having one location to see all of our office pools, and we're hopeful they'll fix the bracket problem pre-tournament tip-off.
Price: $0.99


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SportsTap NCAA Basketball Tournament Edition: For basic brackets, game times, up-to-the-minute scores, and sheer freeness, it’s hard to go wrong with this bare-bones app. We’re not sure why, but it also includes similar info for the women’s tournament.
Price: Free



Various Alma Mater Apps: For you alma mater-lovin' basketball fanatics, there are college specific apps that say, “To hell with everyone else, how’s MY team doing?” Among the many teams representing are Duke, UNC, Michigan and Kansas. What no CSU Northridge? Most include news feeds, game times, post-game summaries and pretty pictures. We can't possible review them all, but it's safe to say that if you're walking around with your logo keychain and embroidered alma mater sweater, you'll probably spring for a buck to customize your iPhone/Touch with this app at tournament time.
Prices: It varies, from free for a generic Duke Mobile, to $0.99 for the hoop specific DukeHoops.