About/Contact

The Bracket Briefer is me, Mike Brooks, a rabid Arizona Wildcats fan. I've been predicting the bracket for several years now, usually on message boards. It is, of course, a difficult process, but for everyone who has complained about the accuracy of bracket prediction in general, I decided I needed to try to walk the talk.

The bracket is redone, from scratch, each week. You'll often see a team drop who didn't lose, which might seem odd at first, but remember that the bracket is picked by human beings who are locked in a room for a week. There is not a science to this, because if there were, you know that someone like Ken Pomeroy or Nate Silver would have thrown up an algorithm.

Keep in mind two things. First, the committee uses items such as the RPI index, but they also watch a lot of games all year long. The eye test is important, just as is the paper resume. You never know what will stick in a committee member's head from a game he watched in January, so there will always be a great deal of unpredictability.

Second, only for the first part of the year am I picking which teams I think are the best. As the season ages, the prediction will shift from what I think the bracket should be to what I think the committee will do. This happens primarily because you just can't guess what the committee will do before the conference season is at least half over. Unlike BCS rankings, the NCAA doesn't release weekly bracket updates. I honestly have no idea what the committee might say right now when the RPI doesn't function (too small of a statistical size) and when teams have only played non-conference games. Many at-larges have schedules consisting of primarily neutral court games and home games against severely inferior competition. So early in the season, the bracket seeding will basically be a reflection of how the teams are playing.

Feel free to contact me with questions, concerns, comments, hate mail, or atta boys. My e-mail address is bracketbriefer@gmail.com and you can reach me on Twitter at @bracketbriefer anytime.