JOE LUNARDI. WHY?

by WCT, The Ship of Fools

There are two sure signs that spring is coming. The first is the running of the Daytona 500, which occured last weekend. If you are looking for hard analysis of this race, you have come to the wrong place my friend. There appeared to be a lot of cars making left turns, and somebody named Ryan Newman won. Whatever.

The other beacon of spring is the first on-air appearance by the grinning visage of one Joseph Lunardi.

Lunardi, if you are unaware, is ESPN's expert in "Bracketology." Bracketology, if you are unaware, is a contrived, faux-science whereby a nerdy analyst with little, if anything, to do for 11 months out of the year predicts what teams will be selected for the NCAA Tournament.

Lunardi made his first appearance on SportsCenter last week, and he was in rare form. There was a round of the "in-or-out?" game, talk of teams "on the bubble," discussions of the ever popular "last four in" teams, it was a bracketologist's dream.

Now, I realize that this man is being paid to analyze the entry into one sporting event (not the event itself, mind you, but the entry into said event) and he needs to justify his existence somehow, but do we really need five weeks of hypothetical brackets and meaningless analysis while regular season and conference title games still need to be played? Remember back when there was just a show on Selection Sunday where we found out who had made the Tourney, and that was it? Now we have a guy in February telling us that as things stand now, Xavier and Siena will play in the #3 vs. #14 game in the East Region.

Could you imagine if ESPN did this for other sports? Could you imagine if they had NFL Playoff-ology, and had some nerd on SportsCenter in July telling you that Kansas City and Cincinatti are in line to play each other in the 2009 AFC Wild Card game? What if they had a Bowl-ologist who in Augusts told us who he thought was in-line for the Gator Bowl?

As if all of that weren't bad enough, consider this: While ESPN only graces us with Lunardi's smiling face in the weeks leading up to the Tournament, ESPN.com posts his Bracketology all year round. So he will post a full 65-team prediction of the 2009 (yes 2009) NCAA Tournament this April. So before any players have declared entry into the NBA draft, before coaching changes, hell, before the winning team has even returned to campus, Joe Lunardi has already charted the entire next year's field of 65.

So spring must be right around the corner. We have run the big race in Daytona, and we have seen the first of many ultimately worthless, constantly changing, NCAA Tournament brackets. We might as well get ready to be overwhelmed with bracketology, and the man who made that nonsense word fashionable: Mr. Joe Lunardi.