Tuesday, March 6, 2007
It’s March Madness, the most alliterate month of the year. But does March really need the extra adjective? It’s spring break and non-stop, single-elimination basketball. The best month of the year doesn’t need any more advertising.
My point? Too much emphasis is placed on March during the five-month duration of the college basketball season. This has fans drooling for bracket projections all season, but especially now. It’s like the whole world of college basketball wants to know who’s in, who’s out and who the No. 1 seeds will be.
So the media gives into the fan’s demands and pumps out “bracketologists” by the baker’s dozen. By the way, a “bracketologist” is someone who believes the selection process is as an exact science and uses past trends and numbers to predict the tournament field. It’s almost as if it’s a new career. Using “bracket” and “prediction” in a Google search, nearly one million results turned up.
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A “bracketologist” is someone who believes the selection process is as an exact science and uses past trends and numbers to predict the tournament field.
Of course in reality, these “bracketologists” don’t know what they’re talking about. If you’d really like to know how a bracket is made, read one of the articles written after 20 reporters were shown the inside of the selection committee’s process on Feb. 7. Before then, it was unexplored territory.
The committee explained how everything works to the group. Then the group became the committee for a day to make a bracket themselves.
The results of that day debunked a key myth that “bracketologists” still cling to: the importance of the RPI. ESPN’s Andy Katz wrote in his report on the event: “The RPI was on the screen when teams were compared, but a team’s RPI wasn’t used in any argument that was discussed among the entire group.”
Flaws are a part of the RPI, which is a computer rating system based on winning percentage and strength of schedule. The committee acknowledges this fact, but the national experts in the media won’t stop talking about the importance for a team to have wins against the RPI top 50.
The selection process is inexact and unpredictable. My advice is to just say no to “bracketology.” The bracket you see on Selection Sunday is the only one that matters. What these self-proclaimed experts say does not make a difference.
Pat Forde, another ESPN writer who was among the 20 invited by the committee, wrote in his article: “NCAA staffers said that when their five-day selection marathon is done and they’re driving home, they’ll often hear radio commentators saying things that are so wrong they can only laugh.”
So please, stop listening to these people and smell the regular season. It’s been pretty special so far.
Robinett is an Austin, Texas senior in journalism.
— Edited by Joe Caponio
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