Thursday, June 21, 2007

Whether it's 6 months before the season starts or 6 minutes, I'm always wary of pre-season brackets. Generally, they're a waste of time. How much do I care? My own pre-season bracket in early November just runs down the teams in the pre-season polls. That's it.

That's why with Joe Lunardi's second bracket of the offseason released yesterday, I don't have a major opinion about it. Joe admits it's probably unnecessary and highly inaccurate, but that he did get the top seeds from his first pre-season bracket last year correct. Well, good for him. And that's the extent to which I care when I read early brackets. Do I need to figure out who's fighting for the bubble right now? No.

Two minor qualms I might have about Joe's bracket. Until we see the performances on the court, I'm not convinced we'll see a conference send nine teams to the dance. And the fact that UNC has earned the overall seed based on this unknown Lunardi formula is pretty laughable.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Welcome to the new blog for The Bracket Project, one of a host of websites aimed at predicting what the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament bracket will look like come mid-March. The 2007-08 season will mark the 4th year I'll be creating not only a bracket, but also a table that shows team seedings from other fellow bracketologists both in the media world and in the blogosphere.

Who am I? I'm Brian and call San Jose, CA my home. I work as a business analyst by day and I'm a Cal alum (Go Bears!) but I'll be impartial as long as Ben Braun keeps on coaching the basketball team. I'll still root for them but that team ain't going nowhere. The beauty of my job is the flexible work hours I get to do other things like this, but first and foremost, my job and the rest of my life come first, so if an update doesn't occur as scheduled, I hope you'll understand why instead of shooting off a hundred emails to my account.

There were a number of reasons why I wanted to create a blog. Using a different server will allow me to communicate with you just in case my regular webhost goes down (like it did for a few days last year). User interaction I hope will go up, unlike my two previous attempts to do such a thing. And an archive will be produced documenting what I say so that I can bite my tongue later for what I said.

If you want to contribute to the site this year by adding a bracket site to track, please click on the Bracket Matrix link to the right and read the guidelines over there. In the meantime, enjoy your summer and come right back here in November when the season begins.