Many of you probably know by now that I am not a big fan of the bracketologists.  To be fair – it is hypocritical.  I love reading them – so I am sucked in just like everyone else who follows college basketball.  But then they make my skin crawl when I read some of it.

ESPN and Joe Lunardi have pushed my buttons today – maybe simply because I have watched them change their last 4 teams throughout the day.  I think the part that bothers me is when he complains about criticism, he will mention things like individual games don’t happen in a vacuum – your favorite team might have won but another team’s win might have been more impressive and changed the rankings.  Fair enough – but what he has done today makes me believe he isn’t very consistent.

Lets look at the last day of updates:

Going into today, his rankings are: Wichita St, Villanova, Iowa St, La Salle, Temple, Virginia, Boise St, and Tennessee are in – Ole Miss, Alabama, Southern Miss, Baylor, Arizona St, Kentucky, Providence and Iowa are out.

In early games, Kentucky wins against Florida – while Providence loses at UConn.  So, Lunardi puts an update.

3 pm IN: Wichita St, Villanova, Iowa St, La Salle, Temple, Virginia, Kentucky, Boise St – while OUT: Tennessee, Ole Miss, Alabama, Southern Miss, Baylor, Arizona St, Maryland, Iowa are out.

So, can appreciate that the Kentucky victory might be large enough to get the Wildcats in.  Also makes sense Providence dropping out of the picture – but a little odd that Maryland – who is not playing today now has jumped in ahead of Iowa.

Now, for the next wave of games.  Wichita St, Iowa St, Boise St, Tennessee, Ole Miss, Alabama, and Iowa all win.  Two had victories against teams projected in the field (Boise St beat San Diego St and Tennessee beat Missouri).  La Salle gets blown out by 24 at St. Louis, and Arizona St gets blown out by 15 at Arizona.  Both St. Louis and Arizona are ranked teams playing at home – but those are still pretty big losses.  This leads into the next update:

7 pm IN: Wichita St, Iowa St, Villanova, Temple, Kentucky, Boise St, La Salle, Tennessee – OUT: Virginia, Ole Miss, Alabama, Southern Miss, Baylor, Arizona St, Iowa, Maryland. 

Wait a second – what just happened.  Tennessee jumps into the tournament for their big victory.  Fine.  Can understand that it isn’t Boise St who drops out since they had a big victory also.  But at 3 pm, Kentucky’s jump for their victory put them behind Virginia – who doesn’t play today.  Yet, it is Virginia that has fallen out of the tournament.  Maybe he is reconsidering because he doesn’t like the idea of bringing Kentucky in and then putting them back out.  But it is still rather curious that the team to take the fall is Virginia.   Why wouldn’t it be La Salle – the team that just lost by 24 points.   Lets not even mention the fact that Iowa and Maryland are still behind the Arizona State team that also just lost big.

There is also a curious part about Wichita State – they had just won by 15 points to make their conference championship game.  Meanwhile, three teams just a few spots above the Shockers the day before (Minnesota, Oklahoma and Colorado) all lost to teams with losing records.  Apparently, Lunardi also feels it is not necessary to look at the middle of the rankings – we will just leave Wichita St on the bubble.

Finally, Baylor upsets Kansas and Southern Miss beats UCF.  This leads to next update.

10 pm IN: Iowa St, Colorado, Villanova, Temple, Kentucky, Boise St, La Salle, Tennessee – OUT: Virginia, Baylor, Ole Miss, Southern Miss, Alabama, Iowa, Maryland, Arizona St.

Lunardi finally gives credit to Wichita St and moves them off the bubble.  He also moves up Baylor and Southern Miss for their victory – and moves up Iowa and Maryland over Arizona St.   At least he is finally catching up – but to be fair, Wichita St, Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, and Arizona St all finished their games (or didn’t play) before the 7 pm update.  Nothing happened between 7 pm and 10 pm that should have changed the rankings for those teams (other than movement from teams that did play during that time).

It tells me one of three things is happening:

• Lunardi is really just using an ultra-sophisticated model that is crunching numbers of all the games – and some other victory of a game that doesn’t appear to matter really is changing the reflection of how big of victories these teams are having.   I wouldn’t blame him for doing that if he has to update 4 times in a day, but I think his model needs some work.
• Lunardi is just not keeping up with all the games.  The game that has caught his eye is the big one that is directing him to make a change.  That at least gives more rational to the corrections at the end of the night.  But for teams that are moving from in the tournament to out of the tournament, that is a big deal – he still hasn’t corrected the issue on Virginia….
• Lunardi is just very inconsistent with his rankings and the whole thing is just really about creating hype.

OK – that was mean – of course, the whole thing is about creating hype – whether he is inconsistent or not.  But here’s my problem.  You can’t tell me that these things don’t influence the committee.  They know they can go to the ESPN or CBS site and the guy who is following the games and creating real time ratings believes Team A should be out.  While I like to believe the committee at the end of the day does what they want, it is hard not to believe that the media doesn’t somewhat influence opinions – and that is tremendously unfair to Team A if the only thing they have done wrong that day is not play a game.

I agree with Lunardi that things don’t happen in a vacuum.  Teams can win and lose games and find themselves in an unexpectedly different place in the rankings because others have won or lost.  But at the end of the day, if I believed Virginia was better than Kentucky at Time A – and neither team played by Time B, there is no reason that these teams should switch places.  Other teams that have won or loss – sure.  But once I have made a choice that a team is better, I need one of them to play before I can move them compared to each other.

To be fair, Virginia is just an example.  I personally don’t have an opinion yet on whether the big victories the Cavaliers have had make up for the crazy bad losses they have.  They are one of the most difficult decisions that the committee has – especially if they don’t do something special over the last week.  But the point is that tomorrow, that team inconsistently moved could be Boise St or Villanova or Kentucky – and all of that can influence opinions – potentially unfairly.

OK – that’s enough of my rant.  Just figured I should get my bracketology rant out of the way during the weekend.  Now, I can go back to enjoying the games (San Diego is trying to upset St. Mary’s in the WCC tournament…..)