When the leaves ripen red, birds from all over the country begin to head south. When the branches are left bare, the bears hibernate for the winter.
Come spring, the birds migrate again and Westwood native Jake Liker feels the pull of seasonal rhythms toward the fruitless pursuit of perfection. He opens a spreadsheet and takes up arms with a small legion of a few hundred college basketball obsessives trying to predict the future through months of research.
This is “bracketology,” the niche step before March Madness: trying to guess each team’s seeding in the NCAA hoops tournament. Liker was one of 229 brackets entered in 2023 on a site dubbed “The support project”, a charming center for both, say, the industry professional and the humble actuary to compete in their projections.
It’s an exercise in futility, said six-year veteran David Letcka. Study all the data you want, but at the end of the day, this practice is subject to human opinion. By sheer luck. And usually, Liker said, Selection Sunday is like a disappointing “Deal or No Deal” watch: bracket specialists left feeling like they’d opened the $500,000 case and shouting four-letter words at the television.
“He always joked… ‘this thing I do that keeps me sane,’” Liker said. “Or just the right amount of crazy.”
So Liker, a law student home from NYU over spring break, had the lowest hopes as he sat in his living room on Sunday. But when he began to compare the seeds with his support, introduced 13 minutes before the start of the show, he began to trust his parents.
“The Gaels of Iona!” he announced he.
“At 13he seed, the Gaels of Iona”, Greg Gumbel announced back from the television.
And alone. she kept Happening.
Liker stayed up until the sun came up again, scrolling through social media. No one had come close to his score of 382. At 4:47 a.m., inside the college basketball bracketology corner on Twitter, bracket specialist Joe Cook-Shugart tweeted: “Looks like someone broke the 380 barrier this year. Congratulations.”
Liker read that, and hit him. He was the someone He broke the barrier A barrier that no one, not ESPN, not Athletic, not CBS Sports, had ever touched.
Suddenly, an anxious 24-year-old trying to find his place in the world was the best bracket doctor in the world.
“That was the moment I realized,” Liker said, “that I could have done something special.”
He paused for a fraction of a second. She smiled.
“Special,” he added, “is a relative term.”
Relative, in the way that bracketology is an ultimately small practice. Much smaller than your office ten dollar pool, go for the horned frogs because it’s fun March madness mayhem.
However, it is “as much an art as it is a science,” as Cook-Shugart put it. A painstaking amount of rim research is needed to accurately project planting decisions. A concept widely considered to have been founded by ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, Bracketology is a devotion largely shared by three groups: professionals who fans turn to for reliable predictions, bloggers who do it for fun, and random guys who have developed a habit.
Liker is in some place between groups two and three. He, like everyone else in said groups, speaks of bracketology as a toxic infatuation: with love, with agony, with an underlying knowledge of the human condition that beckons the frustrating search for the unattainable.
And yet 229 people are fully invested.
“Why do people care about sports?” said Kevin Sweeney, a college basketball writer for Sports Illustrated, when asked why people care about bracketology. “It’s trivial on the fringes, but it’s something where you find community.”
And the Liker achievement resonated throughout the bracketology community: all 67 teams were chosen correctly and 57 were ranked perfectly. Never before achieved in over 15 years.
“Take it from a retired bracketologist – that’s incredibly hard to do,” The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel tweeted about the winning announcement.
Liker grew up a fan of UCLA hoops and joked that he came home for spring break during college solely so he could watch March Madness games with his family. In high school, he began to wonder if there was a formula for filling the perfect group.
It is not like this. It’s called March Madness for a reason, she observed. But what if, Liker wondered, there was a way to find out what the begin of said madness it seemed?
Almost every year since then, for the six weeks leading up to Selection Sunday, Liker has worked six hours every Monday to copy data from 95 teams into painstaking spreadsheets.
“He’s the most meticulous person I’ve ever met,” said Sweeney, who worked at Northwestern’s radio station with Liker.
His strange habit, Liker claimed, had developed to the point where he could recite the profile of most March Madness hopefuls. let’s bite
Iowa State? 10-11 in Quad 1 (high caliber games as determined by the NCAA) and 19-13 overall, he replied. Both correct.
USC? Three Quad 1 wins, and exactly 50he in net rating, he responded. Both correct.
gonzaga? A loss of Quad 3 – you get the point.
“Nobody’s ever done this to me before,” Liker laughed, as he was questioned. “And now I realize how crazy this is.”
In the days that followed, Liker updated the bracket matrix rankings countless times, still feeling a spark of magic when he saw his name at the top.
“Thinking to myself, ‘What the hell did I just do?’” Liker said.
In law school, he’s felt like a fish out of water for months among those who have their lives planned out. It’s been tough and different, and a “real kick in the teeth,” as he put it, in an upbeat voice coming down softly.
So this support was nice. A hobby made better, since he tweetedthat no one had done that hobby before.
“Just another good reminder to me and my insecure mind that maybe I’m going to be okay,” Liker said. “And I know what I’m doing.”
