Cured Madness

I'm not sure why I stopped loving "March Madness" (though it may be when "March Madness" became a ubiquitous term), but I did. It doesn't do anything for me anymore, which might be due to obligations that have made it impossible for me to watch college basketball in the way I did when I was in high school. To add to the possibilities, however, I present Joe Lunardi and the national obsession not with who wins the tournament but with who wins their pool (or, in ESPN's case, the national pool).

I have a friend who pains himself all year in the hope that his beloved school will get a Number 1 seed though, of course, being a top seed has never been a guarantee to reach the Final Four (we'll see what happens this year after last year's fluke, but I'll put it the over-under line at 2 top seeds making it).

I hate the seeding predictions and the absurdity of the major conferences. I hate notions of "easier" quarters of the bracket and that no professional is reprimanded or extolled for their predictions (and, for that matter, who cares if Mel Kiper Jr. gets the mock draft right? Shouldn't we care whether or not he can identify players who will be effective NFL players?). It all seems kind of stupid, and Lunardi is a great target.

And now, Slate's unmitigated, substantiated destruction of Lunardi (in this longer article bashing my beloved Blue Devils and Jim Calhoun, among others) - thanks for doing the research guys:

Joe Lunardi
In the run-up to Selection Sunday, ESPN's Joe Lunardi appeared on the network by the hour to dispense his bracketological wisdom: who's in, who's out, and where everyone should be seeded. Lunardi, the longtime editor of the hyper-detailed hoops preview magazine Blue Ribbon, worked hard to earn his perch. (He did not, as alleged in his Wikipedia entry, win the role on a reality show called Dream Job: Bracketology Edition.)

If only he were up to the job of being the nation's bracket sage. This year, Lunardi predicted 64 of the tournament's 65 teams correctly—OK, more like 33 of 34 considering that 31 spots are taken by automatic qualifiers. Not bad, right? Well, according to the site the Bracket Project—which collected the picks of 61 March Madness prognosticators—92 percent of the bracketeers agreed on 32 of the 34 at-large teams, and a healthy 82 percent agreed on 33 of 34. Bracketology, you see, isn't very hard. Joe Lunardi's entire job this year was to identify a single team. He went 0 for 1: Creighton out, Arizona in. Lunardi also whiffed on the one No. 1 seed for which there wasn't an iron-clad consensus, guessing Memphis instead of UConn.

Perhaps it's unfair to ding him for these slip-ups, as the selection committee doesn't necessarily behave consistently year-to-year. Then again, he's the one who's selling the idea that bracket predicting is a science. If bracketology is indeed a skill, then Joe Lunardi hasn't mastered it. The Bracket Project has ranked the 12 tourney scholars who've been publishing guesses for at least four years, grading them based on how many teams they pick correctly and the accuracy of their seeding forecasts. Lunardi is 10^th out of 12. My early bubble picks for 2010: Bracketology 101 in, Joe Lunardi out.

And to prove my point.