Once again, it’s time for Raymond to come up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket.

This year, I look at the number of fans of the basketball team’s official Facebook page, or one tenth of the number of fans of the school’s athletic department, whichever is greater. The fraction 1/10 is completely arbitrary, but that’s what makes this algorithm highly scientific.

Notes on this year’s algorithm:

• Counting fans also includes people who hatewatch the team. I accept this, because if a lot of people hate a team, it’s probably because they’re “too good.”
• There are over a hundred thousand fans of the stub page for North Carolina Basketball. Too bad they don’t count.
• Others who don’t count: Fans of unofficial pages. Now, you might think that this is an unscientific exclusion, becaus a fan of an unofficial page is still a fan. On the other hand, if an unofficial page out-draws the official page, then I blame the school for doing a bad job. Also: highly scientific.
• Syracuse has not one but two spam pages for their basketball team. (You can tell it’s a spam page because it has no meaningful content and was set up by a person selling SEO services.) Both of them have more fans than the official page, one of them by a factor of over 100×.
• Some schools have a Facebook icon on their Athletics page, but it links to ESPN. I guess I know who their sponsor is.
• Montana’s Facebook icon links to the Facebook home page. Somebody wasn’t paying attention in “Web design 101” class.

Once the field has been narrowed to four teams, the results are determined by a coin flip. (I should have done this when the field reduced to eight teams rather than four, but I messed up and am too lazy to fix it. That’s what make this highly scientific.)

Update:

• Correct predictions are in green.
• Incorrect predictions are in red.
• (!) marks upsets correctly predicted.
• (*) marks upsets predicted but did not take place.
• (x) marks actual upsets not predicted.