Wednesday, February 29, 2012

My Favorite Website This Time Of Year

I am a huge fan of college basketball. I love the NCAA tournament, partly because it always starts the week of birthday. It feels synchronous, like I can mark a new year of my life every time they tip the ball to start the Big Dance. I am renewed every spring.

I particularly like anticipating what teams are and aren't in the tournament. So that's why, after the Super Bowl, I go to concentrating a lot more on college basketball, particularly on websites that dabble in "bracketology," the armchair hobby of predicting the entire field of 64. There are a couple people working for the big sports sites in America who have turned their decades-long prognosticating into a full-time, God bless them.

There are a lot of them. I try and follow a few, mostly the big ones, like ESPN.com (headed by Joe Lunardi) and SI.com (Andy Glockner). But one site takes the time to take all the ones available online, put the results together, and come up with one aggregate bracket. The Bracket Project's Bracket Matrix is a godsend to the diehard bracketology fan.

I am doing what I should've done once I knew about this and am following all the sites that make up the Bracket Matrix. And just for "fun," I am going to list and link to them here. They should be in alphabetical order, but forgive me if there are so many that I just don't have the energy. Also, there are some sites that have not updated for the 2011-2 season. I am leaving those out. I'm guessing they're busy and can't do bracketology anymore.

I am going to add two labels, if applicable, after each website contributor. If the site is under the Blogger umbrella (like Wailing And Failling is), I will follow it and denote that site in this post with the word "Blogger."

I am also going to add a "First" or "Last" at the end. The main part of a bracket projection is the teams on the bubble, namely those that just got in or were left out. For the latter group there is an inconsistent label. Some call refer to them (and they usually group four teams on either side of this cut line) the "Last Four Out," while other sites call them the "First Four Out." If they are the "First Four Out," wouldn't that mean these teams, the ones with the best season record and resumes out of all the teams that this bracketologist believe will not be invited to the tournament, were the first four to be determined not to get in? That's absurd. Using that terminology, the "First Four Out" should the four worst teams in Division I basketball, some time such as Binghamton, which has only one win this year.

I think I'm the only person who cares about this.

Anyway, onto the list of bracketologists:
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