If you haven’t heard by now, yes, we’re doing a Virtual NIT. Here’s how it’s going to work:
Tonight, you will hear nothing from us. Nothing directly, anyway. Joe’s going to use his model to simulate out the remainders of the conference tournaments, simulate out the bracket selection process, and give me the results on both. One important (i.e., unimportant) note on this is that Joe’s not just going to take the average result from the model for all this. There will be upsets. There will be surprises in the selections. It’s all set up such that roughly the normal number of upsets and selection surprises can still happen—there may be more, there may be fewer, just as in real life. The model already simulates the season in this way. It just usually does it 4,000 times a day. In this case, it will only do it once.
Tomorrow, I will share with you what has happened in these virtual tournaments, and how we went from the point we did Wednesday night, in reality, to Thursday morning in this virtual universe.
Sunday, we will record a Virtual NIT Selection Show in which I share the bracket Joe has produced. We will also launch the bracket pool at this time.
Monday, we will have a Virtual NIT Preview for you all, and we will continue to encourage you to fill out your brackets. We will also have a schedule for all the games.
Tuesday, the Virtual NIT will begin. Joe’s built a separate model for this, one that uses three numbers from KenPom (how good a team’s offense is, how good a team’s defense is, and how fast a team’s tempo is) to, possession by possession, simulate games. We won’t get anything but the scores, but Joe has agreed to let me fill in the background. We will be providing live coverage of these simulations as they occur. The First Round will be Tuesday.
From Wednesday onward, the schedule is yet to be determined, but we’ll wrap up the tournament either Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. This schedule will be announced on Monday, when we’ve got a better idea of how long these game simulations take and how many people are joining the bracket pool.
Thank you for joining us for this Virtual NIT. Please tell your friends. Please especially tell those friends if those friends are cool, and if those friends are friends who might want to share it with people they can also get to join the pool. We’re filling a void here. Help us fill that void.
