Go Joe Bruin Bracketology – Week 1

We’re now less than two months away from Selection Sunday. It’s officially bracketology season, and Go Joe Bruin is getting in on the action.

The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament is impossible to predict. There are too many intangibles, too many upsets, too many factors that cannot be accounted for on paper. You can’t predict what the bracket will like after all the madness has taken place.

I was thoroughly convinced of this after 2012, when I picked Missouri to cut down the nets, and then in 2013, when I picked Georgetown to go all the way. Tired of losing bracket pools with family and friends despite my quasi-obsessive knowledge of college basketball, I needed a pick-me-up. I needed to be right about something when it came to college basketball.

That’s how I became a bracketologist. Exasperated with forecasting the storm that ravages brackets across the country every March, I became determined to correctly forecast what the calm before the storm would look like.

It turns out I wasn’t alone. Evidently, bracketology isn’t limited just to ESPN’s Joe Lunardi; in 2015, 136 bracketology entries were submitted to the Bracket Matrix by Selection Sunday. The Matrix ranks every bracketologist based on their accuracy throughout the years.

I couldn’t beat my friends at a game I know much more about. So I have decided instead to refocus my efforts at beating Joe Lunardi at a game which happens to be his profession. What could possibly go wrong?

Next: Cracking The Code