There seems to be a group of topics that get consultants and PR people fired up—topics that are built around a perceived but overblown workforce problem that gives them a chance to offer up their “expertise” every year. You know the issues I’m talking about:

• Office romance at Valentine’s Day;
• The perils of the office Christmas party in December; and,
• March Madness—the NCAA men’s basketball tournament—as a workplace time-waster.

As I wrote here last year, “It’s Madness to Worry About March Madness.” As I wrote then, “All of this talk about lost productivity because of March Madness is nonsense. I haven’t seen any credible research that supports the premise, and the ‘data’ that is used to make the point is soft and suspect.”

Nothing has changed since I wrote that, and in fact, I had some readers write and tell me that March Madness was actually a really good thing for employee bonding, office morale and, in some cases, a great ROI. In fact, I also noted that I didn’t have a single comment that took issue with anything I wrote about March Madness being a positive experience in most workplaces.

Well, March Madness is here again, and so are the consultants, experts and surveys that claim it is a huge problem. CareerBuilder released a survey this week saying 19 percent of workers are involved in March Madness pools (a surprisingly low number, in my view). It implied, without citing any evidence or research, that “productivity in the office may suffer a potential slowdown.” And global outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray and Christmas offered up its nutty annual “cost” of March Madness in the workplace, claiming that the “annual distraction could cost employers as much as $1.7 billion in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the [basketball] tournament.”

Crain’s Detroit Business, a sister publication of Workforce Management, had an interesting story this week that took the position that fantasy sports in the workplace—and by extension, things like March Madness or Super Bowl pools—can really be a good thing for workers and their employers. The headline said it all: “Are Fantasy Sports at Work Bad? Some Executives Bet Not.”

In short, the notion that there is time wasted by employees due to March Madness is just another urban legend. There is no more evidence of workplace productivity losses because of March Madness than there is evidence of alligators in the sewers, Elvis living with aliens, or the Loch Ness Monster. I like fairy tales, but March Madness as a workplace problem is ridiculous.