…Or instead of waiting until the end of January or beginning of February to start up Friday Bauertology, I could just start right now.
Believe me, I was not planning on doing twice-a-week brackets this early! Apparently, I didn’t even start multi-update weeks until March last year, let alone February. This is uncharted waters we’re swimming in! But if I’m serious about staying in tune with the seeding and bracketing process on a daily basis, I think it’s going to be good for me to dip into the torrent well ahead of time.
Another “peek behind the bracketology curtain,” if you will… These things take a long time to put together. Like, a reeeeally long time. In fact, why don’t I relay the whole Bauertology process from start to finish, step-by-step, and you can get to watch the hours fly by in a matter of mere seconds? Sound fun? No? Too bad!
- First things first, I refresh my team sheets by grabbing data from the NCAA and Bart Torvik, to make sure everything is up-to-date. A little tedious doing this every single time I make a new bracket, but not time-consuming at all. Usually takes about 2-3 minutes.
- Next, figuring out the 31 automatic bids! As I’ve mentioned before, I’m picking my auto-bids based on who leads each conference in my personal résumé metric BRCT, up until conference tournaments occur and either said BRCT leader wins the league tourney, or bows out and cedes the auto-bid spot to the top remaining BRCT frontrunner, until the field is narrowed down to the actual automatic bid clincher. Also not bad—just need to sort BRCT by its conference column and pick out the top team. 3-4 minutes.
- Now, the big one: seeding the field of 68. This, as you could probably guess, is where the biggest bulk of time sink lies. Comparing the tournament résumés of, give or take, 90 teams side-by-side, making sure I’m being thorough on every single portion of my analysis, picking the exact right 68 teams to include in the field, and getting their order down from 1-68 in just the exact spots, takes hours. 2-3 hours if I’m lucky, 5-6 hours if I’m really stuck. Thankfully, last night was the former, taking under 2 hours to seed it all from top to bottom—a very rare performance from myself. I’m going to have to have more nights like that if I’m going to be doing twice-a-week Bauertology this early, though I think I’ve figured out a good foundation for doing this, as this year I’ve started the team-sheet comparison process by sorting everybody in order of their résumé metric average (thank you, Bart Torvik), then I just go down the line, one by one, comparing profiles with those nearby until I’ve got them all in just the right spot. (Listening to music while I do my comparisons seems to help move it along too.)
- Then, once I’ve got everything seeded, double-checked for accuracy, triple-checked that I’ve included every conference at least once, quadruple-checked that I still have a shred of sanity left in my brain, it’s time to get bracketing. The Bauertology Resources page is my friend here, with the Bracketing Principles section helpful for if I forget any rules about bracket-building (though I typically have them all memorized), and the Tournament Site Distances page is absolutely critical for making sure that I’m sending teams to the right locations. Thankfully, I’ve got a couple formulas built into my bracketology Google Sheet to ensure that I’m achieving regional balance and that every subregional pod is used twice. But everything else is done by hand: checking on team distances to available sites, confirming that I’m not breaking any principles, and finally plugging teams in to their destinations. This process also requires me to ensure that I’m not producing any first-round rematches (and avoiding second-round rematches whenever possible), which is probably the single most tedious part of it all. Right now, I’m just Command+F’ing team schedules on KenPom; I’m hoping to get the third and final component of the Bauertology Resources page, the Rematches to Avoid section, up and running when I have a bit of spare time on my hands. It’ll at least make that part of the bracketology process very so slightly less of a headache! But, in any case, yeah, this is another massive time sink. Tally it up to take about 1-2 hours. But then the bracket is finished, and that’s it, right?
- No, that’s not it, of course! Then there’s putting together the Bauertology graphics that you’ll see below! Unlike the seed list and bracket, this is not a “from-scratch” process; the templates I’ve created in Photoshop are intentionally easy to update from bracket to bracket, just needing to change the appropriate text, background colors, and logos. Aside from seeding, this is probably the portion that varies the greatest in amount of time spent, all dependent on how many changes there were from the previous update. Sometimes this can take 45 minutes, like it did last night, or it can take nearly 2 hours if the whole seed list got flipped on its face. Now, would I save myself a bunch of time if I just screencapped a spreadsheet and posted that as my graphic instead? Absolutely. But I ain’t gonna half-ass that when I’ve already put in so much time and effort! Not how I roll!
- On to the penultimate part: posting! After a good night’s sleep, I get to work on crafting a bit of reading prior to the bracket and seed list reveal, partly to keep my writing form in tip-top shape, partly to make the Bauertology website link worth your click, and always to preface the work I’ve done and choices I’ve made. This writeup section, pending on how creative I’m feeling, takes anywhere between 30-60 minutes. Adding the graphics are as easy as the click of a button, and, presto, the post is live! Then I share to Twitter and Reddit, and rest on my laurels after a hard day’s work is done, right?
- Nope, gotcha again! (Or, maybe I didn’t if you paid attention the word “penultimate” in the prior paragraph.) What’s the good in sharing my work to social media and then not responding to the commenters looking for more insight? I understand that the national guys aren’t able to provide this same sort of feedback given their busy work schedules, but it just seems silly to me to go through this whole process, and then just leave it out for the world to look at without any further interaction. So, if you leave a comment or question, AND YOU’RE RESPECTFUL IN WHAT YOU SAY, you can almost always guarantee that I’ll get back to you in some capacity. Hard to put a total time on this portion, but we’ll guesstimate and say about 1 hour of answering responses, scattered across the day.
And that’s actually it! Tally all those bold numbers together, and you’ll see that every new Bauertology update, from genesis to completion, takes between 5-12 hours! I’m basically a working a second full-time job here for no pay. It’s merely for the love of the game, and I sure do love it.
Hopefully today’s writeup provides a little perspective in just how taxing the bracketology process can be. It’s a ton of work, but the sensation of accomplishment after every new bracket and seed list is posted, as well as the positive feedback I’ve received from my community, turn it into a rewarding experience every time. A genuine thanks from me to you for making it all so worthwhile.
Now then—let’s actually get to the darn bracket! It’s still morning for me in the mountains, but it’s now afternoon for you East coasters, and ULM vs. Appalachian State has already tipped off. Enjoy the latest update, and see you again on Monday!
