Monthly Archives: February 2013

NCAA Tournament Resumes: The Unseed-ables

On our weekly Bracketology post at College Hoops Journal, my colleague Brennan Keller asks me questions about my bracket.  Oklahoma was a subject of one of those questions, and Brennan actually compared them to Illinois.  It got me thinking that both of these were interesting cases for the Committee.  

Oklahoma and Illinois, along with Virginia, seem to be the most vexing teams for Bracketologists.  I decided to look back in history to see where teams with similar resumes have ended up being seeded in the NCAA Tournament.  Let’s see how it shakes out.

How about a blast from the past?

Comas and Kyle CBS Radio Interview – 2/26/13

Tuesday afternoon, I went on 810am Orlando CBS Radio and discussed college hoops.  It was a great segment where both hosts had some really good questions for me.  I’m introduced at the 2:00 mark.  Here’s what we covered:

  • “How young is too young?” – Nick Saban offers a full ride to an 8th grader
  • Teams on the rise – Georgetown, New Mexico, Saint Louis, Akron
  • How far have Cincinnati and the Valley teams fallen?
  • Notable changes in the top 12 overall seeds – Michigan back to the top line; Michigan State down to 5th overall; Miami down to 6th, and how bad was the Wake Forest loss; New Mexico up to the 2-line at 8th and why they’re there over Kansas, who is 9th
  • Last Four In, First Four Out, Next Four Out – Kentucky’s situation
  • Bracketing Principles – what they are and how they can drive me nuts while projecting brackets; addition of “pods” to my projections; why the Committee puts so much emphasis on geography vs. seeding
  • Where you can find me (other than here) – I mentioned my weekly Bracketology update on CollegeHoopsJournal.com

You can click play above or check out the link here if you’re on a mobile device and/or the embedded player isn’t showing up above.

Bracket Update: Changes are Afoot

As you may know (at least you darn well should), I’ve been posting all of my bracket updates to one page lately so as not to waste valuable front page space with constant updates when little changes from day-to-day.  That plan had to be temporarily abandoned, though, when I went a whole five days without updating the bracket – especially when two of those days were a weekend.

Below, I’ll lay out the biggest changes in the bracket, teams on the rise, on the decline, teams now in danger, and I’ll discuss the biggest addition to this version of all (and it’s not a team).  Enjoy!

Break Down the Bracket

Blogger vs. “Big-Time” – A Bracketology Breakdown

As you know, I’ve been spending my time updating my bracket quite frequently lately.  I do my best to do this exercise independently of other brackets.  Sometimes that can be difficult, so I’m going to embrace it in this post.  Since 83 brackets is far too many to compare to, I’ll use the two most “mainstream” ones that I visit most often – Joe Lunardi’s ESPN bracket and Jerry Palm’s CBS bracket.  Here is what I found (click on each team’s name to see their resume).

Differing opinions await!

All Bracket Updates in One Place!

Instead of creating a brand new post each time I publish a bracket, I’ve moved each and every update to this page (it’s also now a link in the menu bar above).  This was done for ease of access and to conserve space on my home page.  It was also annoying to have readers (and me) sort by the footballandBRACKET-ology category and then actually click into each post because the brackets were posted after the jumps.

My main reason for doing this, though, is that I’m starting to get my process down and – therefore – figuring out that this is easier for me.  To give you a little peek behind the curtain, I try to do a small update every morning based on the previous night’s results.  These are usually just “scrubbing” the seeds and making adjustments as opposed to fully re-bracketing.

With the Bracketing Principles and Procedures involved, it’s really hard to do the full bracket with each update.  Adjusting the lines every night at least allows me to have a jumpstart on this process so that on the two to three times each week I actually do re-bracket, it won’t take me forever to do so.

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