NCAA bracketology: How to lose to a cocker spaniel

Joe Lunardi is assistant vice president for marketing and communications at St. Joseph's University. He also is the radio analyst for St. Joseph's men's basketball games. But that's not why his name has been popping up during virtually every ESPN telecast the last couple of weeks. Lunardi is the inventor and foremost practitioner of bracketology. If you haven't heard of bracketology, you probably fill out your NCAA tournament office pool using favorite nicknames. Lunardi predicts the NCAA tournament field in advance for ESPN. You can find his constantly updated predictions on ESPN.com and Lunardi himself all over ESPN's airwaves this week. Last week, Lunardi spoke with Inquirer staff writer Mike Jensen.

 Question: So what are the origins of the word bracketology?

Lunardi: Well, rumor has it that I was first called a bracketologist by a sportswriter in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Bracketologist spawned bracketology, which spawned a cottage industry.

Q: Who owns the name?

Lunardi: No one owns it. Basically, under my contractual arrangement with ESPN, if it's used on their air, they have rights to it. My own concern has been that I not be shut out of it. Thankfully, that has never occurred. It's now part of the public domain.

Q: Explain bracketology to people.

Lunardi: Bracketology is the art and science of forecasting in advance who will play in the NCAA tournament. It's kind of March Madness before the Madness. And apparently the college basketball public finds that information almost insatiable. If you go back, I started putting projections online for ESPN.com in the mid-'90s. It became its own site under the ESPN umbrella in 2002. The first Monday of January in '02 when it made its debut, it got a quarter of a million hits in an hour and a half - this being 10 weeks before the tournament. We kind of looked at ourselves and said, "Maybe we're on to something here."

Q: How many hits does it get now?

Lunardi: I've heard [roughly] a million hits a week for 10 or 12 weeks.

Q: What's the biggest misconception about how the field is selected?