About The Round Robin
I'm Grant, and The Round Robin is what sixteen years of watching Selection Sunday turned into. I kept wanting to know how the committee actually made the call, so I built the tools to work it out for myself, and then did the same thing for the Hall of Fame and the Oscars.
The Background
I've filled out a bracket projection every year for sixteen years, updating it as results came in, long before I thought about turning any of it into a website. Bracket Matrix, which grades bracketologists against how the field actually turns out, ranked my projections in the global top ten of their Best Overall Bracketologist Composite. I cared about getting it right for its own sake. What I never had was a tool built for the way I actually worked through it.
The Problem
Every season went the same way. I'd split my screen across NET rankings, quad records, and team sheets, and try to hold all of it in my head while I placed teams. The data was always there. There was never a good place to work with it.
Bracket Studio
So I built the tool I always wanted, and tried to make it something you don't need sixteen years of bracket-watching to use. Bracket Studio runs on live data, Warren Nolan's NET resume during the season and ESPN's BPI in the preseason, and it's built around one goal: let anyone work through a field of 76 teams the way the selection committee actually does. Every metric lives in one place, with no tab switching and no spreadsheets.
The Bracket Performance Calculator
The Bracket Performance Calculator measures bracketology precision beyond just picking the right teams. It rewards exact seed placement and grades proximity, which gives a fuller picture of how well a bracket actually reflects the committee's thinking. It runs on the Paymon Scoring System, a metric I built that The Round Robin now hosts.
The Round Robin
The name comes from the round robin format, the fairest evaluation format I know of. Everybody gets measured against everybody else, and the results speak for themselves. That's how I think these decisions ought to be made, and it's the same standard I hold my own models to. Every forecast I publish, mine included, gets graded against what actually happened.
The mission is simple. I want to bring real forecasts, studios, and guides to selection processes that have always run on scattered data and gut feel. That now covers Bracket Studio and the Bracket Performance Calculator for March Madness bracketology, HoFW for the Hall of Fame (a position and era-adjusted worthiness model, validated against every real induction class since 2005), and my Oscars forecast model, which tracks the Academy Awards from preseason through every precursor that fires.
How I Build This
The Round Robin is one person. I use AI to do work that used to take a whole team, and that's how I'm able to run three separate models, keep the data pipelines fed, and ship new tools on my own. I'm saying that plainly because it's part of how this gets built. The decisions and the record are still what this is about.
What's Next
I keep coming back to the same pattern. Find a real selection process with a real committee or voting body behind it, whether that's bracketology, Hall of Fame voting, or the Academy Awards, and build the forecasts, studio, and guides that process always deserved but never got. I don't have a fixed feature list to promise here. I just keep looking for the next decision worth doing this for, and I build it out in the open as it comes together.
Data & Attribution
Bracket Studio is powered by publicly available team-resume data from WarrenNolan.com, including the NET Nitty Gritty report and team-sheet context used throughout the tool.
The Hall of Fame database and HoFW model are built on nflverse/nfl_data_py (which bundles
Pro-Football-Reference draft and seasonal stat data) for career stats and draft pedigree, plus Wikipedia for
award tables, Pro Bowl/All-Pro honors, and Hall of Fame induction history. Both are free, public data sources;
current alpha limitations are documented on the
HoF Forecasts page itself.
My Oscars forecast model is built on precursor award results (PGA, DGA, SAG, WGA, BAFTA, Golden Globes, Critics' Choice), plus Wikipedia for historical nomination and win data, and the TMDB and OMDb APIs for film metadata. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
I pull and structure that data so it can be analyzed in one workflow-focused interface. Bracket Studio's data refreshes nightly, and timestamps inside the app reflect the most recent successful update.
The Round Robin is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the NCAA, the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Warren Nolan, or any member institution or league. All bracketology, NFL Hall of Fame, and Academy Awards terminology is used editorially and for informational purposes.
If you notice a data issue or attribution concern, please reach out and I'll review it promptly.
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The Round Robin started as a passion project, and that's still what drives it. If you find the tools useful, supporting the site helps keep it running and growing.
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Questions, feedback, or just want to talk decision modeling? I'd love to hear from you.
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