Welcome to Better Bracketology

Welcome!  Every year as the NCAA Tournament gets close, I will project the 68 teams that will make the NCAA Tournament.  You probably know of Bracketology through Joe Lunardi, who does the Bracketology for ESPN.  However, the thing with Lunardi is that he buries most of the good information under Insider tags.  For instance, non-Insiders cannot see his last four byes or entire s-curve.  I also plan to project bowl matchups during college football season.  In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am a die-hard Duke fan, but that I will judge all teams from an objective criteria.  In fact, I have nailed Duke's seeding 5 straight years.  Here are some important terms to know about Bracketology:

BRACKETOLOGY: The study of predicting what teams will make (and miss) the NCAA Tournament and where they will be seeded within it.

BUBBLE WATCH: An analysis of what teams are safe, still have work to do, or hacve no chance at the tournament.  On ESPN, the teams are divided into categories of "lock", "should be in" and "work left to do". My categories will be slightly different, but I will talk about that in a Bubble Watch post.

S-CURVE: The s-curve is the entire order in which the teams are ranked.  From this, one can discern whether a certain team is closer to moving up or to moving down.

SELECTION SUNDAY: The day in which the teams who made the tournament and their seeds are announced.  In 2013, it is Sunday, March 17.

AUTO-BID- The winner of 31 of Division I's 32 conferences gets an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, with the Great West the lone exception.  The Ivy League awards its spot to its regular season champion, and the rest go to the conference tournament champions.

AT-LARGE TEAM- One of the 37 teams that qualifies without an auto bid.

FIRST FOUR: In 2011, the NCAA Tournament expanded to 68 teams.  The First Four is comprised of four games, two between the last four at-large teams and two between the bottom four auto-bids.  The at-large teams have played for anywhere from an 11 to a 14 seed, while the auto-bids always play for 16 seeds.  Once, a team from the First Four (VCU in 2011) made the Final Four.

The first edition of both Bracketology and Bubble Watch will be up in time for tomorrow's games.  I plan to debut my "What it Will Take" feature on Sunday for teams that Bubble Watch has on the bubble after tomorrow's games.