Well – while I am sure all of us are ready for Thursday to be here and have the Sweet 16 begin, it is Monday. I thought about blogging about some of the women’s tournament games (there are a couple of really good ones – as UCLA is only up 2 against Creighton, and Iowa is only up 5 against West Virginia). But then I realized, I have tons of material to catch up on.

Now that the games of the first weekend are over with, and I am not trying to handicap 52 games, I should go back and check up on how my bracketology did. This is always a nervous moment for me – as I hate the idea of not doing a good job.

This year, I have two things to check – my bracketology, and my imaginary committee’s bracketology. I got 66 of 68 teams right – while my committee only got 65 of 68 teams. So, it appears that I am better on my own than with a whole bunch of models. Before we compare against the media, lets quickly talk about who I selected wrong.

Basically, I missed on Mississippi State and Virginia. Lets face it – I wanted UVa to get in, but I didn’t expect them to get in with their metrics. And as for Mississippi State, I figured with all the bid stealers, a team that didn’t go better than 50% in their conference would get eliminated. But apparently, the committee went with the metrics on MSU and ignored the metrics for Virginia – who would have guess that.

My committee got MSU right (because it was a lot more tied to the metrics), but missed on Virginia, Texas A&M and Northwestern. So – not the best. If I ever do this exercise again, I will need to really improve the metrics.

My comparison method uses the scoring method from the Bracket Matrix – this is for two reasons – it is as sensible as any other metric, and it tracks so many people’s brackets that the media picks are already scored. You get 3 points for selecting the team correctly, 2 points for getting the seed correct, and 1 point for getting a team within 1 seed line.

For my picks, I selected 66 teams correctly (198 points), got 40 teams seeded exactly correct (80 points), and 60 teams seeded within 1 seed (60 points). 338 points is not bad for me – it is in the middle of the bracket matrix – definitely not the best, but certainly not the worst.

The committee did not do as well. It only got 65 correct (195 points), 35 teams seeded exactly correct (70 points), and 57 within 1 seed (57 points) for only 322 points.

So – I crushed my imaginary committee. A little sad for me because while it shows that I can do better than some statistics, I had high hopes that the statistics would make my seeding better.

Anyways – the real question isn’t how I did against the entire bracket matrix – it is how I did against the media. And it turns out – not that bad.

• FOX – Mike Decourcy – 345 (67, 41, 62)
• Sports Illustrated – Kevin Sweeney – 344 (67, 41, 61)
• THE LUNATIC – 338 (66, 40, 60)
• The Sporting News – Bill Bender – 337 (67, 38, 60)
• ESPN – Joe Lunardi – 336 (67, 38, 59)
• USA Today – Paul Myerberg, Erick Smith and Eddie Timanus332 (67, 36, 59)
• CBS – Jerry Palm – 323 (66, 35, 55)
• LUNATIC COMMITTEE – 322 (65, 35, 57)

So, congratulations to Mike Decourcy – as while I don’t know of all the media members that create a bracket prediction, he did the best of the media members I was tracking.

However, the Lunatic is extremely pleased – while I got one less correct than ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, I did such a better job at seeding that I beat him by 2 points. And I crushed Jerry Palm from CBS (which is a shame – he had this great site that covered the RPI before moving to CBS).

Regardless, any time the Lunatic can beat 4 of the 6 media members, that qualifies as a good job for the year. Still a little disappointed that his committee idea crashed and burned – but glad that my last second change to put my committee vote as its own did so well.

I will at some point have to clean up the bracketology page – it is still stuck on what it said Saturday morning… There is only so much time in the day (and the Lunatic’s old age simply requires more sleep than he used to – he is still sleep deprived, just he needs more sleep to function). That might be an after the tournament project (or a project for the week leading up to the Final Four – where we have to wait 5 full days for basketball to resume.