March 26, 2025

The first weekend of the college basketball playoffs is over and I have life in my brackets.  This year I filled online for a initial bracket, an alternate bracket, and a best guess bracket.  I also filled out hard copy brackets, so I pulled that from the newspaper.  Then Melissa said she would like to do a head-to-head challenge (hardcopy) so I filled out another one for her.  I then filled out two online brackets for the women’s championship.  There seem to be two approaches toward filling out these predictive brackets.  One is the purist approach where only one bracket is allowed.  The other is to fill out as many brackets as possible (a maximum of 25 are allowed by ESPN) and try to gauge all the nuances that might be possible, given upsets and close matchups.  I find myself somewhere in the middle, counting my initial bracket as the “true” representation but still filling out several more brackets for luck.  This annual event for men’s and women’s basketball has become known as bracketology.        

When I looked online, I found Bracketology is the process of predicting the participants in the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.  The name comes from the predictions made while filling in tournament brackets for the postseason.  This process uses some method of predicting the metrics the NCAA Selection Committee will use, such as the rating percentage index through the 2018 tournament, and the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) since 2019, in order to determine at-large (non-conference winning) teams to complete the field of 68 teams, and to seed the field by ranking all teams from first through sixty-eighth.  Bracketology also encompasses the process of predicting the winners of each of the brackets.  Joe Lunardi is credited with inventing the term bracketology.  On February 25, 1996, The Philadelphia Inquirer referred to Lunardi as a bracketologist, which is the first known instance the term was applied to a college basketball expert.   Lunardi soon started the website Bracketology.net, and ESPN began running his predictions in exchange for a link to his website.  By 2002, Lunardi had his own Bracketology page with ESPN.  In recent years the concept of bracketology has been applied to areas other than basketball.

My efforts at bracketology have only been fruitful in one of the men’s brackets.  My purist bracket chose Duke as the winner but only matched 56.8% of the actual winners through the first weekend.  My alternate bracket selected Auburn as the winner and has done much better, choosing 96.7% of the winners and ranking 792,137th on the ESPN site.  The best guess bracket did the worst, choosing Michigan State as the eventual winner and choosing a lowly 17.9% of the winners.  By contrast both of my women’s brackets have done well.  My initial bracket chose U Conn as the champion and scored 97.6% of all winners.  My alternate chose OU as the champion and came in at an astounding 99%.  I do not follow college basketball (except for favorite teams) other than during championship season.  Still, this time of year causes me to watch games I would otherwise skip and the first weekend provided several exciting games.  One of my bracket busters was the Hogs of Arkansas who took two underdog games, including from St. John’s who I had predicted to go to the elite eight.  There are no perfect brackets left for the men (out of 24,388.569) and only 25 for the women (out of 3,425,826).  I guess that is why they call it bracketology (the study of brackets).

THOUGHTS: To try and keep the public involved in the sport (and betting), ESPN has another chance at Bracketology by offering a second chance option.  This starts with Sweet 16 participants and allows you to select who will win based on those still in the tournament.  This did not spark my interest.   If I do not get it right the first time(s), I am not trying again.  I understand the allure, however.  In life we need to both alter our initial approach and try again.  Life is not a predictable bracketology.  Act for all.  Change is coming and it starts with you.