Lunardi had been editor and owner of the Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook, a preseason guide roughly 400 pages long.
[6][7] On February 25, 1996, The Philadelphia Inquirer referred to Lunardi as a bracketologist, which is the first known instance the term was applied to a college basketball expert.
[10] Using the NCAA basketball tournament selection process, the NET, and the seeding and balancing process, a "bracketologist" places teams in the tournament in the various regions (most commonly East, West, Midwest, and South however sometimes the region names are changed to reflect the host cities).
[16][17] However, in 2015 he was bested by his former political rival and 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who ranked in the top 0.1 percent of entrants in ESPN's 2015 Tournament Challenge.
This spread has been helped along by literary agent and writer Mark Reiter and sports journalist Richard Sandomir, who have edited two books on bracketology as applied to the world around them, most recently The Final Four of Everything,[21] which was published by Simon & Schuster in May 2009.