College basketball analyst Joe Lunardi has announced his March Madness bracket predictions. ESPN’s resident “bracketologist” graduated from St. Joseph’s (one wonders whether or not “bracketology” is surrounded by quotation marks on his diploma), which failed to reach the NCAA Tournament this year, presumably freeing him from some level of personal bias.
Joe Lunardi’s Bracket For 2011 NCAA Tournament: He’s Clearly A 1-Seed Fan
Lunardi’s bracket follows a fairly common line of thinking: some fun upsets early, but a normalization in the final rounds with the usual suspects going the deepest in the tournament. In the first round of the West bracket, he’s picked 13-seed Oakland over 4-seed Texas. And in the Southeast, he has 13-seed Belmont upsetting 4-seed Wisconsin. That makes for a fun 13-seed vs. 12-seed match-up in the Field of 32, as Utah State advances past Belmont to reach the Sweet 16.
Ultimately, though, Lunardi has all four top-seeded teams advancing to the Final Four, with Kansas beating Ohio State in the championship. Counter-intuitively enough, this is actually a fairly risky pick from a certain perspective. In the 26 Final Fours since the bracket expanded to 64 teams in 1985, only one of them has been completely made up of 1-seeds.
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