Well, it took me a little longer than I hoped, but the Schedule has been updated for the final 5 games (and the final released NET rankings). I also added the cheat sheet for 2025 – so go ahead and check out the research page.
One heads up about the cheat sheet. With some of the changes to the NCAA website when I pull the schedules, I used it as an excuse to update the offensive and defensive ratings to be based on 100 possessions (similar to what you would see on some of the other analytics websites). What I didn’t think about is that would then break my codes to create the cheat sheet. Rather than trying to unravel what I had done, I decided to simply report in the cheat sheet the metrics that were already calculated.
So when you see metrics like offensive rating, defensive rating, or adjusted margin, please realize those are based on 100 possessions. I also changed the schedule splitter to be by Quad instead of their exact ratings (those still list out the actual margin of the game – no adjustments). It still should provide some pretty basic pieces of information if you are looking to make some quick decisions. You will still be able to see what teams had beaten which opponents. It just is formatted slightly differently. But figured that was better than needing to spend all of tomorrow night trying to figure it out.
Lets face it, we want ranting of the Lunatic anyways. This lets me move on to my handicapping page. So, while all of you are concentrating on winning the actual pool, I will be doing a pointless exercise to predict against the spread all 67 games.
As for my bracketology, I am pretty pleased. It looks like I only got 1 team wrong (I picked Indiana instead of Texas). That is actually better than what Joe Lunardi (who missed 2) from ESPN or Jerry Palm (who missed 3) from CBS did. I was basing off the information on the Bracket Matrix website, so not sure if that is 100% accurate or up to date. That being said, I will probably lose to them with my seeding, where I made a few major mistakes that I am still scratching my head about.
The one that has got me so confused is Louisville as an 8 seed. The Cardinals entered this week as the 13th ranked team in the AP poll, made it all the way to the conference championship, including beating Clemson, who ended up as a 5 seed. I might have to revisit that at some point, but for now, I am simply happy that my bracket got 67 of 68 teams right, and the only team that I got wrong was because I refused to believe the committee would really put 14 of the 16 SEC schools into the tournament. If that was my only real mistake, I can feel good about that.