Rocco Miller cannot recall the exact moment when he felt the crazy urge to project which men’s college basketball teams were going to make the NCAA Tournament by ranking 80 or so by hand on a notepad every week based on a list of criteria that he, alone, devised.

But he remembers what triggered this sleep-reducing idea: watching ESPN’s Joe Lunardi on television night after night, and getting frustrated by his opinions on locks, bubble teams, first-four-ins and first-four-outs.

“I wanted to do it to see if I could do better,” said Miller, 36.

Bracketology — the scientific-sounding name for prognosticating tournament picks before the official committee reveals the bracket on Selection Sunday — has exploded among basketball fans in recent years, fueled by social media, at-home podcasts and a website, Bracket Matrix, that tracks the accuracy of the forecasters, from pros like Lunardi to faceless amateurs with screen names like LoboFan2003 and One Man Selection Committee.

In bracketology’s purest form, the black-and-white details of who actually wins games in the tournament is beside the point. To people like Lunardi — the patron saint of the Church of Bracketology — and Jerry Palm at CBS, the real science is in picking the field itself, and in the calculations that rank one team above another.

The interest in knowing who the “expert” bracketologists think is going to get in has inspired fans to figure out their own formulas. When Bracket Matrix began in 2005, its founder, Brian Phan, said he compiled 15 published brackets from around the country. This year, the number was 187.

Many of them are actually good. Quite good. And Lunardi has noticed.

“Know and respect quite a few of them, and have tried to make myself available over the years,” Lunardi wrote in an email. “Many are super smart, smarter than I’ve ever been, in terms of the analytics.”

It might not come as a shock, then, that Bracket Matrix — using its own formula for accuracy based on teams picked correctly, teams seeded correctly, and teams predicted within one spot of their seed line — had Lunardi (with his 222,000 Twitter followers and almost round-the-clock ESPN appearances) ranked 75th this year among all the bracketologists on Phan’s leader board.

And over the course of the last five years, Lunardi’s aggregate accuracy is not even in the top 35, making him the equivalent of a No. 9 seed in any bracket among bracketologists.

The top seed belongs to a man named Dave Ommens, who works in public relations for a hospital in southern Indiana, and, in his spare time, runs a site called Bracketville that received about 3,000 visitors a night last week.

In 2008, after getting tired of debating automatic bids and at-large selections with his friends, he started Bracketville. There is nothing amateur about his brackets, which also appear online at NBC Sports. This year, Ommen chose all but one team in the field correctly, with almost the full bracket (64 teams) seeded within one spot of the actual results. Yet this was still only good enough to tie for ninth on Bracket Matrix in 2018.

“The last few years, maybe things have broken in the right way for me,” said Ommen, 47. “But there’s a lot of people who are equally knowledgeable, or more so, who have done this for just as long as I have.”

The growth in interest in bracketology has picked up in recent years. Sixty prognosticators have joined the Bracket Matrix since 2015, a fact that has stunned Phan, who said he did not expect his website to maintain enough interest to last past its first season.

Few groups embody the young fan’s interest in the hobby more than Delphi Bracketology, a club at Delphi Community High School, in Delphi, Indiana, whose membership includes 10 students and three faculty members who meet between 7:15 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Thursday mornings throughout the fall and winter.

Over breakfast, they break down the bracket for months before it is released.

“You have to think outside the box, you have to analyze data, you have to make comparisons, and you have to have some debate skills,” said Brian Tonsoni, the social studies teacher and basketball coach who founded the club in 2016. “They don’t even know they’re learning all that. They just think they’re talking about Gonzaga and Wichita State and Kansas.”

The one thing Miller has learned since he tried to take on Lunardi’s projections is that “it’s not as easy as it looks.”

This season’s field, bracketologists said, was one of the hardest to handicap. The number of teams that could have filled the middle seeds made it hard to feel confident going into Sunday. And then the committee threw a few curveballs with the selections of Syracuse and Arizona State over Southern California, which was included in 92.5 percent of the brackets, according to Phan.

Only one bracketologist, Joe Piazza of LAOJoe’s Bracketology, chose all 68 entrants correctly.

Ahead of the bracket reveal last week, bracketologists of all backgrounds were lamenting the difficulty of predicting this year’s field, the overall parity, the preponderance of bubble teams, and the late nights pouring over spreadsheets. But now that it is out, many are sitting back.

“After this week,” Phan said. “I can be a basketball fan again.”