Preseason Bracketology
Written by: Brian Tonsoni 10/30/2018
The art of selecting teams for a tournament is described as Bracketology. Each year, in college basketball, the NCAA men’s and women’s division I national champion is selected by virtue of a year-end tournament. Predicting the makeup of the tournaments has become a cottage industry in itself.
Most national sports outlets have journalists whose sole responsibility is to predict theses brackets. For the men’s tournament, names like Joe Lunardi of ESPN and Jerry Palm of CBSSports have become quite familiar to fans tracking their favorite teams. Bracketology has become so popular that over 175 individuals and groups have entered the fray to voice their prognostications on the bracket. The website bracketmatrix.com has tracked all of these bracketologists and has developed a scoring and ranking system.
In 2016 a high school club of bracketologists in Delphi, Indiana (@DelphiBrackets) was crowned the national champions of the bracket world. This club is sponsored by yours truly, Brian Tonsoni (@soni42 @SportsTons). We are entering our 5th year as a school club and will be entering a bracket for the 4th year in March. Each year, we have scored better than the previous year and currently reside in the top spot of the veteran bracketologists.
The process of selecting a bracket is quite complex. It involves the same criteria that the actual NCAA tournament committee uses. This includes:
Record
Strength of Schedule
Rating System (new this year)
Quality wins and Bad Losses.
The combination of criteria used is always up for debate. There are 68 teams in the men’s tournament and each team will be slotted into a seed line. A seed line is a number from 1-16 according to the strength of the team’s resume. At that point, teams are placed into a bracket to determine who they play and where.
As the season progresses, we at Delphi Bracketology will share with hoosiers-united.com information about the process, as well as, our in -season projections. We are proud to pair with the Hoosiers-United family. For even more info, please check into delphibracketology.com. You will find information on current brackets, teams, games, and everything that deals with bracket selection. We are looking forward to another successful season and plan on having the Hoosiers in our final seed list in March.
Our pre-season bracket will be released soon. The seeding of teams prior to games starting is simply an educated guess based on reports from preseason and an analysis of rosters. The in-season bracketing is better, because it is based on game result data. The brackets will become more accurate as the season progress. However, there is nothing wrong with having a little fun before the season begins. Check back soon for our first bracket.