Why Does Jerry Palm Hate My Team?

(St. Louis, MO) – How did a computer nerd become one of the most controversial figures in college basketball? Why is Gregg Marshall ripping him immediately after winning the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament? I wanted to know.

I met Jerry Palm three years ago at ‘Arch Madness’ (yes, he goes to games), so recently I reached out to see how the Purdue graduate was holding up under all the anger and angst directed his way.

As a confessed ‘hoops junkie and stat geek’ Palm started researching the RPI in 1994 and began posting his findings on message boards and eventually in newspapers and then on his own site collegeRPI.com. In 2014 he was brought into the CBS Sports family and his work is now seen on their vast website and he appears often on CBS Sports Network’s coverage of our beloved game.

Palm is a number crunching historian, who seeks to predict how the NCAA Selection Committee will fill out their March Madness bracket. He and ESPN’s Joe Lunardi are constantly linked and compared due to their similar roles on college basketball’s two largest media partners.

But why such venom directed toward a number cruncher? Isn’t that a little like blaming the weather man when it snows, or even when he predicts snow?

“It is the nature of the game,” grants Palm. “This isn’t my first rodeo, I’ve been doing this for 23 years. If you’re not telling them what they want to hear, they’re going to be mad at you. It doesn’t really matter that it is based in reality or fact. What I try to do is predict. I’m not predicting what they’re going to be at the end. I’m predicting what they (the selection committee) would do with them right now. So things change from day-to-day.”

For example, Illinois State fans are unhappy with him right now, because he believes their chances of landing in the Big Dance are limited.

 

 

Most of his negative responses this season have come from Wichita State fans, but he says that kind of negativity changes from week-to-week and from year-to-year. Lately he has been hearing from Vanderbilt and Syracuse backers, because they have been playing themselves into contention.

What kind of seed will the Shockers receive? Palm admits that seeding is less scientific than the selection process.

“Teams that look like Wichita State get seeded in the bottom half of the bracket,” says Palm. “That’s likely where they will end up, but you never know. But Wichita, is going to wear dark uniforms in the first round.”

Palm says the Shockers actually had a better profile last year when they received an eleven seed.

He never looks at Lunardi’s bracket or that of other bracketologists. While he respects their work, he doesn’t want to get stuck in what he calls ‘group think’, but he admits, he usually knows what Lunardi thinks because angry fans let him know.

His ratings predictions are not about who is a better team, but who will be selected and where they will be seeded.

I asked him about the summit earlier in the season that brought together Ken Pomeroy, Lunardi, Jeff Sagarin and others, to see if those rating systems could be combined in some way to form an aggregate rating to help in the selection process.  He and the others involved, found it somewhat unfruitful. The measurements do not lend themselves to being able to be combined, and he says Ken Pomeroy’s ratings have become a favorite of fans that dislike him.

 

 

 

Make no mistake there is a human element involved, particularly in the seeding process. Also the RPI cannot measure a late season injury. The committee members are not supposed to notice that a team is better at the end of the season, than they were at the beginning, but that is impossible for them to not notice.

The RPI, according to Palm is 100% mathematical. He says anyone with a computer and too much time on their hand can figure it out.

However the committee works out a subjective process guided by objective data.

 

 

The Bracket Project is a site that ranks bracketologists. Their math equations involve a certain amount of points awarded for the correct team in the bracket, the perfect seed and within one of the right position. None of the famous bracket experts are rated in the top 20 according to their 5-year Bracket Matrix. When or how those brackets are submitted or finalized is not clear, but for a numbers guy, this is an interesting site.

(Interesting side-note, our friend Jesse Kramer of thecatchandshoot.com is ranked 36th nationally as a bracktologist!)

Jerry Palm insists he doesn’t predict who will win games, who is the better team, nor does he have influence over the Selection Committee, and he doesn’t hate your team!

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