Bracketology

I never understood bracketology to the extent that it really isn't predicting anything. Bracketologists don't predict who is going to be in the tournament. They simply take the teams that are doing well now, and rank them. You might be saying, can't they train a monkey to do that, or at least develop some sort of a program that does that for us? Well, yea, but don't tell that to Joe Lunardi or Jerry Palm.

Read the top of Palm's bracketology (hes on sportsline). "Bracket projections are always based on "as if the tournament started today." I am not predicting how teams will finish the season. The conference "champion" is the team with the fewest conference losses, with ties broken by RPI. I am not predicting that team will win the league. It is just the current leader. As conference tournament seeding gets determined, the leader will be the highest remaining seed in the conference tournament."

Not only is this not an exercise in anything difficult whatsoever, but its also insulting to us, the readers. Do Palm and Lunardi really think we're so dumb that we can't figure out who should and shouldn't be in? I would appreciate it if there existed someone in the world that would forecast the games, and say "yes, team X is 14-5 now, but they havent played anyone, and i project them to be 19-10, and out of the tournament in 2 months." That way, I wouldn't have to do it. This of course will never happen, because of two things that are inherent with everything ESPN does:

1) it is very political. They assign teams lock status that have no business being locks, and they therefore then have a much harder time falling out of the bracket. Villanova, Texas A&M, Florida State - all these teams should be in, I wont argue that, but none should be ranked higher than a 7.

2) ESPN doesn't like to make predictions. If they do, they don't fess up to it, because doing so would de-legitimize their careers. This is probably a bigger issue for another column, but I've spoken to a few people about this topic. There a few things I don't understand about the jobs at ESPN and how we the public follow them. Humans love reading 'expert' opinions and predictions of who is going to win, to feel as if we have some sort of insider grasp on the game (even if you aren't gambling on it), yet then, more often than not, we're happy when the underdog wins. Why is this? Why does anyone want to see Frank Caliendo, or a special guest on ESPN gameday make their picks? Those who do make predictions are often wrong (as is natural), but they don't atone for their mistakes. Most notably, as a friend pointed out to me, Mel Kiper Jr. He constantly gets predictions of who will be good and bad in the NFL wrong. Instead of saying "I fucked up, and was wrong," it is always a case of the player over-achieving or under-achieving. Kiper is never wrong, it's just that the player did something totally different.

If Jerry Palm were 'predicting' the field as of today, (the word predicting should just be replaced with cutting and pasting), you would think that he would at least get it right. So I don't really understand why George Mason would be an 8 seed, and Texas A&M and Kansas State would bea a 6 and 7. Last week, he had Kansas State as a team on the outside looking in. Now, they're a 7 seed?

He probably would have predicted that, if he did that sort of thing.