CLAYBORN, IA — Doug Wenstrom, 52, a senior adjuster at Clayborn County Mutual who spent the better part of eleven hours last Sunday building what he described as “a real instrument” of bracket prediction, was mathematically eliminated from the office pool Saturday afternoon by a team he had been referring to all week as “St. John’s Methodist,” under the firm impression it was a regional hospital somewhere outside Indianapolis.
Wenstrom’s spreadsheet, printed double-sided and presented to colleagues in a three-ring binder labeled MARCH ’25 — DO NOT MOVE, weighted fourteen separate variables, including average free-throw percentage in domed venues, coach hairline, mascot “intimidation index,” and a column simply titled SPIRITUAL FEEL, which he declined to explain. He had picked Auburn to win it all on the strength of what he called “a hunch supported by data.”
“Doug walked over to my desk Monday and used the phrase ‘efficient frontier,'” said Marlene Vetch, who handles homeowner claims and who picked her bracket Wednesday morning during a phone call with her mother. Vetch is currently in second place. “I asked him if he wanted coffee and he said he was already ‘caffeinated for a reason.'”
The pool, which carries a $20 buy-in and a hand-lettered trophy that has lived on top of the photocopier since 2017, is now led by Sue Albrecht in accounts receivable, who selected her teams based on a system she described, without embarrassment, as “whichever town sounded like somewhere I’d want to eat lunch.” Mrs. Peterson, who is not employed at Clayborn County Mutual but submitted a bracket anyway because her grandson works in IT, finished her picks in roughly four minutes by selecting every team whose primary color matched a curtain in her kitchen, and is currently tied for fourth.
Wenstrom’s elimination occurred at approximately 4:18 p.m. Saturday, when the school he had penciled into his Final Four — a mid-major he repeatedly assured colleagues had “a really clean rotation” — lost by nineteen to an opponent Wenstrom believed, until Friday, was a Lutheran seminary. Informed of his error by a coworker showing him the team’s Wikipedia page on a phone, Wenstrom reportedly nodded once and returned to his desk, where he was later observed eating a granola bar with the wrapper still partially on.
“I had it modeled,” Wenstrom said Saturday evening at the Hen House Diner, where he was eating alone at the counter. “I had it modeled three different ways. I had a Monte Carlo on it.” Asked what a Monte Carlo was, he said he wasn’t entirely sure but had read about it on a Reddit thread devoted to fantasy hockey.
Hen House waitress Janelle Ortiz, refilling his coffee, observed that Mr. Wenstrom had been talking about the spreadsheet “since the second week of February” and that several regulars had begun timing their visits to avoid the booth where he kept the binder open. “He showed me the SPIRITUAL FEEL column on a Tuesday,” Ortiz said. “I do not get paid enough to look at a SPIRITUAL FEEL column on a Tuesday.”
County Recorder Bill Hauer, asked for comment on the broader phenomenon of Clayborn County office pools, said it was “a great American tradition that proves, year after year, that the people who care the most know the least,” then immediately asked the reporter not to print that, then said it was fine to print but to attribute it to “a county official.” His own bracket was eliminated Thursday.
Wenstrom, for his part, has already begun a preliminary spreadsheet for the 2026 tournament. He told colleagues Sunday morning that this year’s loss had given him “a lot of really useful data,” and that he intends to add a fifteenth variable, the nature of which he is still working out.