Lunardi: “I actually wanted to be an accountant”

PHILADELPHIA, PA — Joe Lunardi sits slumped over in his favorite easy chair and lets out a huge sigh of relief following Sunday’s NCAA Tournament selection show, a practice that has become an all too familiar ritual to the expert of bracket breakdowns and predictor of March Madness matchups. Still, Lunardi’s past successes don’t necessarily make the process of predicting the field of 65 any less stressful.

“I’ve been doing this ‘Bracketology’ thing for ten years now, so I must say I’ve gotten pretty damn good at it,” says Lunardi, who comes under fire from his wife each March for constructing brackets out of permanent marker on the living room wall of the couple’s Philadelphia home. “That said, each year seems to be just as crazy as the one before. Everything is so unpredictable, and you never know what’s going to happen, especially during conference tournament week. Look at Georgia; I had to create a whole new bracket on the kitchen wall when they won the SEC tournament. The wife wasn’t too crazy about that. Yet, somehow, I always manage to pull it together amidst the nagging at home and retain my 98% success rate each year.”

But, as he explained to SSNN, the seemingly innate skill that has lent Lunardi the label of ‘Bracketologist’ since 1998 happened by accident, when the then 35-year-old aspiring accountant set foot on the ESPN campus in Bristol, Conn.

“What most people don’t know is that I was originally hired by ESPN to be a staff accountant ten years ago,” the self-proclaimed “avid numbers pusher” said. “They wanted me to construct a company-wide budget that would allow for sufficient allocation for Jay Bilas and Digger Phelps’ makeup, especially during the months of March and April. Then, one day, my boss came to me with the idea of participating in a department tournament pool. I told him I had already written up my own bracket before Selection Sunday and, as it turned out, I guessed correctly on every single seed, in all four regions. The rest, as they say, is history.”

In addition to his now high-profile position at ESPN, Lunardi also serves as a color commentator for St. Joseph’s University basketball broadcasts, a job he says lends credibility to his tournament predictions while deflecting his true passion.

“I have and always will love accounting. Numbers are my passion; why do you think I am so good at foreseeing each team’s seeding position? The problem is, now they’re saying they want me to teach a Bracketology class,” said Lunardi, who also assists the vice president as an employee of the school’s department of communication. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; this skill can’t be taught. It’s an ability I was just born with – there’s nothing for me to pass on. It’s not like I can walk into that classroom, sprinkle a bunch of fairy dust on the class, and produce a whole generation of future bracketologists. It takes an impassioned accountant with too much time on his hands and an overzealous love for college basketball. How many guys like that are out there, really?

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!