I love prognosticators.

They have this amazing knack for never getting anything wrong. I mean obviously not all of their predictions are correct, but when these people are wrong, they somehow manage to still be right.

Case in point, the 2017 NCAA tournament.

All these know-it-alls, especially from ESPN, have been touting the ACC all season. Best conference, deepest conference, best teams at the top, etc. This has resulted in the ACC gaining 9, count them, 9 bids to the tournament. But it doesn’t stop there, the ACC was given a 1 seed, two 2 seeds, a 3 seed, and two 5 seeds.

So how many from the vaunted conference got into the Sweet 16?

One.

Yes, only one. North Carolina. And even then they were pushed to the brink by an average Arkansas team.

So one would think that these famed prognosticators that were hyping the ACC all season would eat a little crow and re-evaluate themselves a bit.

But no. Not these people. Much like Trump does whenever he is caught in one of his many lies, these people ‘double down’ and rationalize (or change the story) to the result.

I heard Jay Bilas say ‘it is clear the competition of the ACC just wore down everyone’ and Jay Williams say ‘just a few bad breaks for the ACC’, etc. First off, it doesn’t help that ESPN only hires ex-Duke players to do their prime time analysis. But secondly, no one gets to say that and be taken seriously. Can you imagine a doctor having a theory, get the data, and then change the theory to accommodate the results? Well, I can. I see it every day. And guess what? Those research projects never end up in the New England Journal.

Same with Bilas and co.; you don’t get to explain a result that clearly defies your thoughts with some alternative fact that you just made up. I know these guys fancy themselves as intellectuals, but what they really are is a bunch of pseudo posers trying to save face from their shitty takes.

Yeah, I know one tournament doesn’t tell the entire story of the season (even though ironically that is exactly how the NCAA and ESPN package and sell it), but when you have 8 teams bow out early to teams from other conferences and only 1 that stands through it, it has to say something, and that something is NOT ‘oh they were too tired and Duke is still the best team’.

I would just love to hear one day one of those goofballs fess up and say ‘I was wrong. Sure, if they played the tournament again, more than 1 out of 9 would advance, but we don’t get to do that. When I praise Duke and co. for past tournament success, I should also criticize when there is tournament failure’.

Yeah, I am not holding my breath.