NCAA: The Myth Of Bracketology
By Nathan Giese
Everybody likes to have a little bit of fun with their sports. Some don’t take it as seriously as the die-hard fans. They’re looking to be entertained and find enjoyment out of athletes putting themselves out there, working hard to win a game.
Fantasy football went from being a secretive thing you did with your co-workers and college buddies to this global phenomenon worth millions, maybe even billions, of dollars every year. Fantasy baseball and basketball are a little behind football, but they’re catching up in a hurry.
College sports? Well that’s a little more difficult. It’s harder to play fantasy sports on college players because there’s just so many of them. There are two major divisions of college football, so how would you go about picking players? Would you limit them to FBS, or would you include the FCS as well?
College baseball? That’s not a big market and players come and go between high school and the MLB all the time, so that’s even more difficult.
And with college basketball, there’s 351 teams at the Division-I level. Where do you even start? You could look at forums and study up on who the best players are and hope to land someone who will shine, but your buddy Devin from human resources might be a huge college hoops junkie and know about really good players you’ve never heard of. We most certainly can’t let Devin gloat in the break room for another year, so let’s not risk that.
With college basketball, it’s much easier to focus on the teams rather than the players and bet on them. There’s now four postseason tournaments for college hoops, but the only one the majority of fans care about is the big one. The NCAA Tournament. March Madness.
March Madness brings out the crazy in the casual and the insane in the die-hard. You work tirelessly to get the perfect bracket, before just getting bragging rights for being able to predict the futures for 68 teams better than anyone else could. Suck it, Devin! But now, there’s much more at stake. About one billion things more at stake.
With a billion dollars at stake, clearly you want now more than ever to be the man. It’s easy to place some names on a corresponding line to the right or left and hope you win, but it takes much more than simple guessing to get your billion back, America. The work begins in November and escalates starting in January. Not paying attention for the long haul can make you exit the contest early.
Brackets are fun and all, but the business has been directed towards bracketology, the “psuedoscience of predicting and analyzing a sports tournament bracket” according to wordsense.eu. No, seriously. There’s an actual definition for it and everything.
This business is so cut-throat that anybody who has tried to predict a bracket for any NCAA Tournament before the field is offical can attest that the practice often seems silly and a little trivial. There’s really no perfect way to go about it and you’ll never, ever, get a perfect score. It’s the unpassable test you give yourself for no reason.
While making a bracket before the field is official is a bit unnecessary and sometimes psychotic, many still do them, most of the time on a weekly basis. They may not be neccessary, but fans crave them. They have this itch that only a certain number of people can scratch. Fans want to know who’s in the tournament field if the season ended today (a complete impossibility, mind you).
Almost every website (probably all of them, I don’t have time to look at every website in the world) that covers college basketball has somebody that does bracketology. Here’s a few examples from some of the top sports websites on the interweb and their bracket guy (with latest bracket): ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, CBSSports.com’s Jerry Palm and Fox Sports’ Stewart Mandel.
Looking at all three of these, you’ll notice a pattern. Other than a few minor seeding differences and a team here or there being out or in compared to somebody else’s, you’ll notice they’re all fairly the same. Shouldn’t be too surprising, because at this point of the season, the top teams have started to separate themselves from the others and there’s only a few other teams still trying to create an acceptable resume. Pretty straight-forward, right?
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Now, go ahead and take a gander at the current standings of all college basketball conferences (as of Jan. 27). Especially in Joe Lunardi’s, you’ll notice one thing in particular, if you look closely enough or bother to look at both.
Seeds 13 to 16 all currently lead their conference. You may be saying, “Well, yeah. If the season ended today, they’d get in.” While that’s a correct way to think about it, it’s also the incorrect way to think about it.
Those seeds are usually reserved for the mid-majors, the teams fans only care about when they beat a ranked team or upset a high seed in the NCAA Tournament. When looking at those leagues as they currently sit, there is only one conference where the difference is over one game between first and second. That conference is the Ohio Valley, where there is 1.5 games separating Murray State from Eastern Illinois.
So with such a small difference between first and second in all these conferences, how can one distinguish who’s going to go to the tournament over the other? Head-to-head matchups, usually, but sometimes even that doesn’t mean anything, as one team could have played one more game than the other, but the team in second place beat the team in first place in their first meeting. This is the case in the Summit League.
What’s so interesting about this, though, is that the fans that look at these brackets would assume that those placed in the bracket are the teams guys such as Lunardi, Palm and Mandel are predicting to make the tournament. All it is is taking the top team in the standings at the time and placing them in there.
Again, it sounds like a good way to go about it, but with the mid-majors, it’s not that simple. Unlike the high-major conferences, such as the ACC, Big-12 and Big Ten, the team that wins the conference regular season title is in no way guaranteed a spot in the NCAA Tournament. They are guaranteed a spot in the NIT, though.
Mid-majors, like most other conferences as well, must play a conference tournament game, with the winner of that three, four or five day event earning the automatic qualification for the NCAA Tournament. Win the regular season, or, to put it differently, be the top team in your respective conference’s standings and lose in the tournament? You get the NIT.
That’s why bracketology is a bit of a myth. Most of the time, you’re not going to get the type of predicting you’d expect to see in this type of scenario. Many will take the easy way out and say, “Oh, they’re leading their conference. It’s Jan. 26. They’re in!” despite there being at least another month to play games and a conference tournament to decide who’s really in.
This saves them from having to actually watch games, talk to people that cover those conferences and actually do the work to know who’s the best team in the conference. Another way of saying it: it’s the easy way out.
Like with most things in college basketball, or college sports in general, mid-majors usually get the shaft. It’s pretty telling when the guys getting paid to predict who’s in the tournament won’t even bother to do any actual predicting. That would be too hard, because those conference tournaments can be a crapshoot.
This much is true, but at least Jerry Palm bothered to put Eastern Washington in his bracket even though Sacramento State currently leads them by a whopping half-game in the Big Sky standings. Lunardi’s approach is understandable, but misguided. Going off of the “if the season ended today” approach is good in theory, but the season doesn’t end when you put that latest bracket out there for fans to devour. There’s still a lot of basketball to be played.
Bracketology is directed more towards the fans than it is the media or the teams. It’s used as a viewership tool for websites, getting fans to click and see if so-and-so has their team in the Big Dance. If they don’t have your team in, whoever put the bracket together is wrong and should be fired for not being good at their jobs.
There’s no problem with what guys such as Lunardi, Palm, Mandel and the many others that do weekly brackets do, but there’s a misdirection involved that fans should be weary of. Most of these brackets will be wrong, looking absolutely nothing like what you see in January. Come March, it’s anybody’s guess to how the NCAA Tournament field will look.
It’s meant as an entertainment tool, but some take bracketology a little too seriously. Don’t take these things too seriously, because there’s more underneath the surface of these brackets than you actually see on the screen.
Unless you’re Devin. Then you can go ahead and take them as gospel. They’re totally trustworthy.