It’s about this time of year when Joe Lunardi gets texts from his pals at Llanerch Country Club, in Havertown, Pennsylvania, that the golf season isn’t far off.
Lunardi isn’t too busy to answer, but he’s too busy to play because he’s the man behind bracketology, the pervasive American sports obsession that focuses on the 68 teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
He’s busy from mid-February through Selection Sunday until the championship game on April 7, providing ESPN and its viewers the nuts-and-bolts information to make their picks or at least join in on the water cooler/social media conversation.
Bracketology was born because of Lunardi’s quizzical nature as a part-time basketball writer for the Delaware County Daily Times in the 1980s.
“... I was a bracket nerd before there was such a thing. I was fascinated with the tournament.”
Joe Lunardi
Lunardi, 64, of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, covered Philadelphia’s Big Five schools when hoops-wild Philly-area readers were seeking information on the tournament chances of their favorite teams.
“I was tracking the locals and their tournament prospects in a way that nobody was doing at the time,” Lunardi said. “And I was learning about the selection process, how teams would get seeded, and where they would be placed. I was a bracket nerd before there was such a thing. I was fascinated with the tournament.”
A 1982 Saint Joseph’s University graduate who worked at the school until 2019, most recently as director of marketing and broadcast services, Lunardi credits former athletic director Don DiJulia for introducing him to the most appropriate staff members of the NCAA to “at least ask good questions.”
He jokingly added: “If Al Gore doesn’t invent the internet I don’t know if bracketology becomes a thing.”
Lunardi, who carries a USGA Handicap Index of 14.3, ramped up the learning curve through his work covering college basketball as a student and then at Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook, the go-to source for the game when printed materials ruled basketball coverage. It remains a respected handbook in basketball circles.
A part-owner in the enterprise, Lunardi became its managing editor in 1991. Lunardi called the statistics and information format without photos “meat and potatoes and more potatoes.”
“A good part of me misses the organic fun of those days,” he said.
He started writing sports as a freshman at St. Joe’s and got the basketball beat “because the sports editor was a junior and he was the drummer at home games, and he wanted to do that and drink beer more than have the beat.”
That blossomed into working Palestra doubleheaders in his freshman year when the University of Pennsylvania advanced to the Final Four. In his junior year (1981), St. Joe’s made a remarkable run through the NCAA Tournament and beat No. 1 DePaul before losing to Bob Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers. The Hawks were one game away from playing in the Final Four at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, where he worked as a part of the media operations team and watched Indiana beat North Carolina for the title.
“I have my 15 minutes of fame. It lasts from the Super Bowl to Selection Sunday and that’s perfect. During those weeks, I don’t get a day off or many hours off. But it sure makes the start of golf season that much more delightful.”
In ensuing years, television coverage of March Madness and the consumption of information online fueled the growth in interest in what was then a 64-team field.
ESPN and CBS led the TV charge in tournament coverage and the Bristol, Connecticut, outfit reached out to Lunardi to become a contributor to ESPN in 1996, which led to the birth of the term bracketology.
“There’s a debate with Mike Jensen and me,” Lunardi said of the now-retired award-winning Philadelphia Inquirer writer. “He claims that I said it first and I claim he wrote it first.”
Lunardi referred to himself as a bracketologist in an interview regarding Temple basketball and continued: “(Jensen) wrote so-called or self-proclaimed bracketologist and that became bracketology.”
Each year from the day after the Super Bowl until the end of the NCAA Tournament, Lunardi is on-call as an analyst for ESPN as a full-time employee for bracketology. Unbeknownst to a majority of hoop followers, he did not start full-time status until he retired from his longtime position at St. Joe’s in 2019 at age 60.
“I have my 15 minutes of fame,” Lunardi said. “It lasts from the Super Bowl to Selection Sunday and that’s perfect. During those weeks, I don’t get a day off or many hours off. But it sure makes the start of golf season that much more delightful.”
He is often recognized in airports and restaurants when the TVs are catching every minute of the tournament.
When his oldest daughter was in college, she’d call him after watching ESPN’s coverage and seeing a team’s resume on a graphic with the words: According to Lunardi – fill in the blank of the team’s chances. “She’s said, ‘Dad, they changed your name again to According To,’” Lunardi said with a grin.
A “sneaky, fast and annoying” hockey player as a kid, his love of basketball “was probably an unintended consequence of deciding to go to St. Joe’s,” he said.
For decades, Lunardi has been the color analyst of the St. Joe’s radio network for basketball, and he was recognized for his 1,200th game last season.
After CBS airs its “One Shining Moment” video to wrap up the tournament, Lunardi is thinking about his two or three times a week visits to Llanerch in the spring, summer and fall.
“I’m sneaky long, the white tees are not a problem for me,” Lunardi joked. “I am about 20 lessons away from bogey golf. I’m a 14. At our club, I am dead on bogey golf.”
He has been texting with his friends since February about the start of the golf season and loves the 4 p.m. “walk 9 and then have a burger and a Pepsi” rounds.
Lunardi has never broken 80 but has shot 82 twice – once at the Springhaven Club and once at Applebrook Golf Club. His lowest round at Llanerch is 84 and he shot 89 at Merion East at a Coaches vs. Cancer event by rolling in a 30-foot par putt on the treacherous 13th hole. Lastly, he shot 90 at Pine Valley once in his three visits.
The iconic layout in Clementon, New Jersey, is his No. 1 Philadelphia-area course.
“Everybody’s playing for second after Pine Valley,” Lunardi said. “It’s in its own tier. Every hole is a postcard.”
If he had five courses to play in five days, he’d choose Pine Valley, Merion (“just because”), Applebrook, Huntingdon Valley Country Club (“incredibly hard and incredibly great”) and Atlantic City Country Club (“I love the inlet holes”).
Post-round there’s likely to be sports talk and it will spin toward bracketology.
Lunardi, who received a letter from the Oxford English Dictionary in London about 10 years ago to confirm that bracketology had been added, was casually pleased by the news.
“Something’s got to go on everybody’s tombstones,” Lunardi said. “I hope mine is big enough for all those letters.”
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COURTesy ESPN
