Digital Hoops Blast & the NCAA Bracket Challenge

I have to admit it, I have a problem.

I love brackets.

I've admired brackets on who's the best coach in ACC history (link here). I've been amused by the Bigger Dance bracket contest (follow them on Twitter here). I can't even sleep the night before Selection Sunday.

My point is that a bracket system makes anything fun.

But the NCAA Basketball tournament Selection Show is the best of them all. There's nothing better. I haven't missed watching one of those shows since I can remember. I scheduled my day around it when I was 10 years old (as much as 10 year-olds schedule their days). And I think the lack of a cool selection show played a role in the canceling of EA Sports' NCAA Basketball Franchise (link here).

So that gets me to now.

CBS and the NCAA unveiled a Bracket Challenge. Link to it here, behold it below. I'll pause for a minute so you can soak up the goodness that is the image below!

I saw this when I was making one of my regular visits to the NCAA site. It got me excited - now I could finally have a chance to play Selection Sunday expert!

And, to make this even better, they asked me, from Digital Hoops Blast, to participate in an experts group. Being a passionate college basketball guy, I got immediately excited.

When I saw the roster of talented basketball experts I'd be matched up against, this got surreal. I was asked to compete against the experts, whom I spend a good chunk of about every day reading. It's a pretty stacked lineup:

Gary Parrish, Jerry Palm, and Gregg Doyel (CBS), Andy Staples (SI), Ryan Fagan (Sporting News), Ryan Feldman (The Hoops Report), Zach Bell (Slipper Still Fits), Shawn Siegel (College Hoops Net), Jeff Borzello (March Madness All Season), Shelby Mast (Bracket WAG), Daniel Evans (Online Sports Fanatic), Chris Kulenych and Craig Gately (Bracketology 101), and Zach Hayes (Rush the Court)

Which is exactly the point of this challenge. Show what you know about the college game and how you stack up against the best minds.... and how you all then stack up against the committee.

So with that, it was time to sign in.

Upon entering into the site (here) and sign in with a profile. You are taken to the grid of all NCAA teams, shown below. This is a pretty sweet area. You become the committee. You can sort teams by RPI or record. You can filter the list by conference. And you simply drag and drop teams into the regions on the right...

If you want more information, you click in. As you can see in the image below, 55% of users put St Mary's in the tournament at an average seeding of #11. Meaning last night's victory over Gonzaga really surprised a lot of people. And took someone's spot in 45% of the brackets!

From this detail page, you can view their Stats and Key players. The user rankings update every hour or so. That's a lot of info to soak in...

And you go about this in just that way -- select teams on the left, drag them to a spot. Click in for more info.

Eventually, you make it here (see my image below). This tells you that you've completed the Bracket Challenge. And that you have until selection time March 14 to update your rankings.

Pretty solid.

As you know, on this site, we like to go a little further. How can we take what's inspiring and then envision where it could go? Here's what I'd love to see...

1. Clinched Spots. Give me some form of indication on teams that have already clinched a spot. Northern Iowa won the MVC tourney, and they are guaranteed a spot. This should be a drop down area to make sure you put them in the bracket.
2. Alerts. Let me sign up for email alerts if things change. What do I mean? Well, suppose I picked Wichita State to win the MVC tourney and the Valley's automatic bid. After the UNI title game victory, I should get an alert that I need to find a spot in my bracket for them.
3. Spell Check. How many of us have had our face saved by that handy spell check tool? Similarly, this needs a little second set of eyes. Give us some form of check to make sure we have all the automatic bids included. It's tough to find a listing of all the automatic bids out there, and letting us know if we missed the SWAC, for example, would be helpful.
4. Experiences as Prizes. What if the winner of this challenge got to sit in the room with the committee next year? That'd be incredible.
5. Insight. Help us know how to choose regions. It's hard enough to pick your 4 three seeds (mine are Purdue, Tennessee, New Mexico, & Pitt as of today). But how do you decide what region to put them in. A tutorial could be helpful.
6. Finally, TV exposure. What if the results of fan brackets infiltrated the TV Selection show? So when you saw the split screens of U Conn and Virginia Tech (my current last two at large teams to make it) we would see that 31% and 59% of fans, respectively, put them into the Bracket. That'd be hot!

This is a lot of fun, and a much needed experience. I'll be back to tweak my picks between now and March 14! I'll Twitter about my success (or failure) in competing against this stacked lineup, so please follow me on Twitter, here.

Make sure you check out the experience for yourself, here!

Andy