help test my bracket builder app - BYOBracket
So I'm as pumped as you guys are about reaching nine wins in conference, seeing as how Michigan is all but guaranteed a tourney selection now - no small feat given the last fifteen years or so.
A few weeks ago I set about to make a web app that I could extend my bracket obsessing with, similar sort of to the bracket matrix but basically a build-your-own-bracket type of deal. I'm putting it out in the wild today to give it a spin.
Build a bracket, share it, or log in and save it and keep it updated. It is intended to be a free tool for everyone to test out their bracketology skills.
My goal is that come March I will have built out a lot of additional features including a "collective" bracket that averages all of the registered brackets, bracket scoring and rating for when selection sunday comes, etc.
What I need is for some ppl to play around with it and give me some feedback as to whether or not it's fun, where it breaks, and what kinds of stuff I could do to make it awesome. Send me your feedback here or on twitter @byobracket.
Link?
Link.
I hope you enjoy and GO BLUE!
February 12th, 2012 at 5:31 PM ^
Is that once you put a team in to the bracket, it no longer shows up to type them in again.
Going through 65 teams one is liable to forget who they already put in and repeat a team.
February 12th, 2012 at 5:44 PM ^
That's definitely high up on the to-do list.
February 12th, 2012 at 6:12 PM ^
Pretty cool idea dude. I think I would suck so hard at predicting the bracket, so I didn't even bother.
February 12th, 2012 at 6:21 PM ^
Well I did one then went to register to save it and lost all of my progress so now i just wasted a lot of time... o well
February 12th, 2012 at 6:37 PM ^
I didn't think that use-case through very well... :(
Sorry for the mishap.
(*EDIT: This has been hotfixed. Any bracket that is currently in the session will be automatically saved as whatever it is when you successfully register a new user.)
February 12th, 2012 at 7:02 PM ^
IDK how easy this is to do but, potentially add resumes for teams you are trying to select
February 12th, 2012 at 7:15 PM ^
This is on my radar but I'll need to research where I can scrape this sort of data from (W-L records, RPI, Road Wins, etc.). If you have any good suggestions, I'm all ears.
February 12th, 2012 at 7:05 PM ^
Perhaps a way to assign a different seed to the play-in games, since it's not determined what those seeds will be until the committee announces the bracket. (Still one of the stupidest ideas ever.)
February 12th, 2012 at 7:18 PM ^
It's a programming nightmare to go from a very nice and clean 64 team field to this 68 team "fluid" seeding nonsense. This will have to be one of the things that gets figured out but it might be a few weeks away.
February 12th, 2012 at 8:27 PM ^
can you show the mean/median seed assigned for a given team? or at least let users see a "community" bracket using those figures. seems like that could turn it into a cool crowdsourced bracket prediction.
another suggestion would be to turn this into a pool game as a pre-cursor to the actual bracket pool. set up a group, invite your degenerate ncaa basketball gambler friends, pitch in $20 each, and whoever has the closest to the actual bracket wins the lot.
we should have had something similar for this recruiting season. enough with the nonsense- put your money on the line and predict which kid lands where. gotta be a recruting violation in there somewhere, but i bet there would have been a lot of gamblin' fools on this board to run a real racket.
February 12th, 2012 at 8:36 PM ^
My plan is to roll out a "suggested bracket" feature that you can use as a starting point based on the latest Bracket Matrix standings, as early as next week sometime.
All of my plans for creating groups and ranking and scorings are still up in the air although I aim to get something in place by the time conference tournaments roll around.
I need to hit up jamiemac to see what can be done on the gambling end of things. :)
February 13th, 2012 at 10:49 AM ^
Eastern Michigan is called 'East Michigan'
Also, I like Michigan's chances in my bracket http://byobracket.com/ZRXs9t
February 13th, 2012 at 1:21 PM ^
Nice work on the app. Just curious from another developer, what language, framework, etc did you use?
February 13th, 2012 at 2:08 PM ^
PHP and I'm using CodeIgniter for the framework.