THE SIMPLE MATH

Now that we have officially put you on notice, it’s time to let you clowns know how we do things around here. It’s a simple system, really, so here are some things you have to keep in mind when taking a look at the projected brackets we will post each Monday:

1) In the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship, there are 31 automatic bids. In our bracket, much like your lame bracket projection, those 31 spots will go to the current leader of each conference. Although we may think teams like Nevada will eventually fall out of the conference lead and not make the tournament (since Nick Fezekas should go do you know what to himself), we give them their due for holding the conference lead at that particular point. After all, and as the ladies would agree, we’re nice like that.

2) 65-31=34. Simple math I know; but, we’re pretty sure some of you could screw that up. What’s the 34? Well, it’s the number of at-large bids available to the teams not cool enough to win their conference; but, still get invited to this invitation-only affair. Each Monday, we will say who belongs; and, sadly, discuss who doesn’t.

Now that we have the basic math out of the way, it’s time to discuss how we pick the 34 at-large teams.

First off, we identify the tournament locks (for example, the group of hillbillies out yonder) and place them into the field. Once we do this, it leaves about eight spots open for a spot in the tournament. We take the non-locks (around 24 teams) and place them into a “bubble pool” in which they get graded on their overall numbers. We input the numbers into our fancy equation which spits grades out in a fancy top-to-bottom order. The top eight teams get into the tournament, the other 16 are left pondering about a party nobody wants to attend.

Now, we might be going over some of your heads here; but, the equation we use involves giving certain categories more weight and other categories less weight as each team is compared against one another in each particular category. The categories we look at for each team are as follows:

RPI
Conference RPI
Quality wins (wins versus the top 50)
Bad losses (losses outside the top 100)
Last 10 games
Road/Neutral site record

After considering the following six categories, the fine product Bill Gates gave us tells us which eight teams rank the highest and we place them into our field of 65.

Once we have our field of 65, we seed the field. We seed the field using the fancy equation as well, except we add three factors:

A team's rank within its conference
AP poll
Coaches' poll

Once this is done, we follow all the rules of bracketing as stated by the insane governing body and complete our projection.

After posting the projected field each Monday, we will highlight key games during the week and provide our analysis as how it affects each team in the projected bracket. By doing so, we hope it gives everyone a better idea as to why a group of bitter, powerful white men might shatter your dreams on March 12, 2006.