I. Puzzled Bracket Nation
Whoa. Have so many experts ever been so wrong? I lamented my terrible year for about 30 minutes until I got online and saw that just about everyone was way off. Click here for a comparison of how the experts did (WARNING! Shield the eyes of small children, the elderly, and pets). I did better than some and not as well as a few others. Overall, it was a horrid year for TBB. Certainly the worst I've ever had in the six years I've done this. I had never missed more than two teams until this year (three).
Clearly, this year's committee evaluated teams a little differently than past committees.
II. My piece on the aftermath of the bracket is up on SCS.com.
III. Here is the actual bracket. You may have to shrink it down to print it. I'll work on making it print ready.
IV. SCKySSiP Note
The craziest thing about all of this is that our seven-member committee's work largely corroborated what most bracketologists thought was going to happen. When I put together a bracket, it is just my evaluation teams and what I think the committee will do. The SCKySSiP mock committee nominated teams for consideration, just like the real committee. We actually voted every team in, just like the real committee. We voted every seed into their spot, just like the real committee. And we came to a general consensus with a split on the last team in. Three of us liked Seton Hall, four others liked George Mason. Utah State got minimal consideration and Air Force never had a chance. Even with seven people seeing the data in seven different ways, 33/34 at-large teams were pretty much agreed upon.
As I wrote in my SCS.com piece above, the committee seemed to play favorites to those teams who had representation on the committee. Others, including Jerry Palm from CollegeRPI.com, have echoed as much and I expect many others will as well.
In my personal bracket, I got 62/65 teams right, 25 exactly right, and 49 teams within one seed of actual. Historically, this is terrible. This year, it compares with most other experts out there.
The SCKySSiP got 62/65, 31 exactly right (pretty good this year), and 48 within one seed of actual. If you count them up, the numbers will say we had 29 exactly right, but we had a contingency to switch Iowa and BC if Iowa won and BC lost. That scenario happened and I did not have time to update before the selection show hit the airwaves. These are bad numbers compared to normal seasons, but this was not a normal bracket.
