When Selection Sunday was only days away last week, Joe Lunardi was operating on what he calls his "fever pitch."
Every waking moment was spent glued to the TV, with every men's college basketball game that mattered to the selection committee flickering, all so he could update his NCAA tournament projections from his laptop, late into the night.
Forget about sleep. Forget about eating or breathing — much. ESPN's "Joey Brackets" usually exhales only after the Selection Show.
That exhale should have come Sunday evening — after CBS' annual bracket reveal — but instead it came disturbingly earlier this year.
Lunardi was at a hotel Thursday in Bristol, Conn., sipping coffee and fiddling with his projections when word came that the NCAA was canceling March Madness.
"The fan part of me was sad way more than the bracket guy," Lunardi said in a phone interview. "I was just dazed because I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. But I'm very mindful of the fact that way more people have it so much worse."
Lunardi did not spend Sunday at ESPN's campus, with sports fans hanging on his every word about the 68-team NCAA tournament bracket.
He was home in Philadelphia with his wife, Pam. They planned to discuss how their youngest daughter, Elizabeth, will try graduating from St. Joseph's University this spring while being limited to online classes.
"We're just Mom and Dad at this point," Lunardi said. "We're going through things as I'm sure parents everywhere are experiencing."
A strange thing happened for Lunardi last week, even when college basketball and the NCAA tournament hysteria disappeared.
After wading through a week of surreal sports developments and shutting down his laptop, he realized there was still a clamoring for his projections.
It wasn't just from rabid fans. He got texts from head coaches, too. They wanted to show their players — and administrators with checkbooks for pay raise season — where their teams might have finished.
So on Friday, Lunardi did just that. He revealed a "final" bracket, with Kansas, Gonzaga, Dayton and Baylor as No. 1 seeds. He had 10 Big Ten teams making the field, which would have been a record.
It received hundreds of likes on Twitter once he posted it.
Some coaches even asked him to do an NIT bracket. And since he was on that subject, would the Gophers have made the NIT field? Not below .500 at 15-16. He calls this the Lunardi Rule.
The NCAA also considered releasing a 68-team field Sunday to at least give teams a chance to enjoy knowing they would have made the Big Dance. Lunardi said he would have loved that, and not just so his picks could be proven right or wrong.
He figured it would bring some sense of normalcy to Selection Sunday. A nice thought, at least. But it wouldn't replace the national holiday feeling of that first Thursday of the tournament, the drama into the late nights of the first weekend, the Sweet 16, the Elite Eight, the Final Four.
"I'm going to miss watching basketball as a fan terribly like millions of other people," Lunardi said. "But Lord willing it will come back. That's why it's this year's participants that deserve our consolation."
