Bracket-building is a fun process.
When performing bracketology, anyone can create a seed list of teams ranked 1 to 68. But that’s only half the fun; the people who stop there don’t know what they’re missing.
When I’ve finished building my bracket, after following all the principles for maintaining balance in regions, avoiding rematches, trying to keep teams as close to home as possible, etc., I like to review it from top to bottom and kind of pretend that I’m Greg Gumbel, revealing the tournament bracket for all to see (and, in the process, see if I’ve made any errors). It just brings a little bit of whimsy to the bracketology process that it surely needs.
Bracketology also tends to create naturally juicy matchups. People like to speculate that the selection committee seeds teams or places them into the bracket in a certain way to make some tournament drama. For the most part, this isn’t true; it just happens that way more frequently than you can imagine.
So, yes, believe it or not, this projection that features Duke, Kentucky, and Gonzaga all in the same Seattle pod happened as a natural consequence of the bracketing process. Go figure.
And it’s circumstances like that that make me say to fellow bracketologists who only seed the teams: go learn up the bracketing rules and give it a try. And you can use these handy dandy tools on the Bauertology website to help with locations and avoiding rematches in order to make your life a little easier.
Enjoy the projection for today, Friday, Jan. 27.
THE BRACKET
THE TRUE SEED LIST, BUBBLE, AND BIDS BY CONFERENCE
BAUERTOLOGY 