📄 2041 Dance Partners, Building a Better Bracket w/ EC Hood: Part 1 Feb 6th

Dance Partners, Building a Better Bracket. A bracketology presentation by EC Hood

A bracketology presentation by EC Hood

It’s the first bracketology in the first season of CBGM with the new superconferences, and naturally that changes what we do here. This started as a way to pump out a better bracket than the game’s AI could come up with, notably by keeping conference foes away from each other until at least the Sweet Sixteen. That’s no longer feasible.

While things aren’t as crazy as they were in real life with league flirting with double-digit bids, it will be very difficult to find a “perfect” bracket that follows all the rules we’ve laid out in the past. On top of that, teams from smaller conferences continue to power up, challenging the big boys but also making things messy around the 11/12/13 lines.

As always, we’re doing our best to make things realistic.

In this first effort, we’ve managed to do a decent job keeping conference foes apart in the early rounds. As it’s only early February in the game, the bracket can change drastically from sim to sim from here on out. As of right now, the last four in are Purdue, Mississippi State, Georgia Southern and .500 Kansas. The Ivy League is close to sending three teams as Penn is my first team out. Cornell and Princeton are in right now. The NET rankings are not that dominant for the teams in the middle in the big leagues like the SEC, Big 10 and ACC. Mid majors still have a shot.

Keep an eye on leagues like the MEAC, America East and Southland for some unconventional bid stealers.

Good luck down the stretch, everyone!

The Rules:

1. No two teams from the same conference will play each other before the Elite 8 unless impossible to avoid.
2. No at-large teams will be seeded below the 12 line unless impossible to avoid. The play-in at-large teams will always be the last four at-large teams that made it.
3. Note: Conference champion bid predictions are determined by the team with the best in-conference record, and higher NET ranking if tied, at the time of the update if the league title game hasn’t been played yet.
4. This is not a prediction of what the actual bracket will end up being in the game. It is a prediction of what the bracket would be if this season occurred in real life right now and was picked by the NCAA committee.
5. I’m not quite the NCAA committee – I’m not going to examine every injury to determine if a result was legit or not and I probably won’t have time to drill down into every team sheet. In the end, this is just for fun.

IN GAME DATE: Feb 6th