In the good old days when Greg Ambrosius was still in charge of the FSTA, we used to have our annual pre-baseball season industry business conference in Vegas every year, right during the first week of March Madness. That meant everyone in the fantasy sports industry could write off (and justify to significant others) a trip that would constitute a vacation for them in any other circumstances.

One year (probably around 2004), we were late in booking our FSTA-reserved reduced-rate rooms at the Rio - all of them got snapped up by early January. So it fell upon me to figure out reasonable market-rate accommodations. I looked online, called room brokers, called individual hotels, tried to offer free publicity to them, asked friends with hookups - to no avail. The best I could do was a room at the Mirage for about $400 a night, and we figured we'd just squeeze three of us in there with a rollaway, in lieu of getting two rooms.

(That was also the year when one of our interns did 9 shots at the poker table and lost all his money, and another person we knew blacked out and was down $10 K (15 percent of his yearly income) before winning half of it back by half a point on the under in the Georgia Tech game).

In any event, I was reading more news today about the economic doom and gloom, and it occurred to me to check out Hotels.com for room rates for that week. Surely, if people aren't overflowing into Vegas during the first weekend of March Madness, that's diagnostic of an impending economic collapse. And keep in mind this is late February - weeks later than when I tried to secure the room five years ago.

Here's my result.

There are five-star hotels for less than $150.

Face it - we're f|STAR||STAR||STAR||STAR||STAR|.