Football
Jay Bilas, College Basketball Analyst 17y

Kool-Aid, highlighters and NCAA Tournament debates

Now that my weekly Challenge with SI's Grant Wahl has me superciliously referring to myself in the third person, the Bilastrator has his undies in a bunch over the lofty epistle of the Bracketologist, our own Joe Lunardi. It seems that the Bracketologist takes the Bilastrator to task for … gasp … suggesting that Michigan deserved an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament last year. The Bracketologist haughtily opined that the Bilastrator was "trumpeting a Michigan team that lost seven of its last nine games." The Bracketologist's tone suggests intellectual superiority over the Bilastrator, which is a dubious claim, at best. Of course, the Bilastrator approves wholeheartedly of any shots taken at one Digger Phelps, fair or unfair.

Here is what is fair: to have a reasonable debate about teams and résumés and which teams are "most deserving" of inclusion into the NCAA Tournament. Here is what is unfair: revisionist history and suggesting that the Bilastrator's arguments were motivated by anything other that what I really believe, and that the Bilastrator did not vote his conscience.

The Bilastrator was distressed to hear that the Bracketologist had "abandoned his principles" in making his predictions last year. The Bracketologist has always said that he is not telling us which teams are best, rather, he is predicting what the selection committee will do. The Bracketologist, while informative and entertaining, annually "trumpets" his record in predicting the field to the point of carpal tunnel syndrome from patting himself on the back. Every year, we hear that the Bracketologist accurately predicted 64 of the 65 teams in the NCAA Tournament. Nostradamus could not do much better.

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