Most bracketologists are confidently wrong.

In 1999 the psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a paper at Cornell with a long title and a very short argument: people who are bad at something tend to be the most confident about it. The pattern is now their namesake.

Bracketology is a near-perfect case study. Anyone with a few college basketball opinions feels qualified to write an S-curve. A surprising number of those people are very confidently wrong, very consistently. So are most of the experts, just by smaller margins.

We put Kruger’s name first because he ran the experiments as a grad student. Standard convention buries his contribution. That, and the reversal sounds better as a wordmark.

Tournament prediction is a cognitive funhouse mirror. Every March, millions of people fill out brackets, almost everyone loses, and almost everyone is sure they would have done better with a different upset call or a wiser pick on the bubble.

Most platforms reward being right. We’re building a platform that rewards being calibrated. Picking with appropriate confidence is a skill. Knowing when to hedge is a skill. The best bracketologists separate themselves from the rest not by being right more often, but by being right at the right level of certainty.

That’s the difference between “I knew it!” said after the fact and “I had 70% on Houston, 55% on Auburn, 30% on the 12-seed upset” said before the fact. One is hindsight bias. The other is calibration.

Every product surface here exists to measure something.

We also run a Blind Resume mode and a crowd-ELO leaderboard for cross-tier team calibration. Those are at /blind and /rankings/crowd.

We’re building tooling for the people who actually do this work. A permanent home for your S-curve at krugerdunning.com/b/[handle]. Auto-generated share cards. Bracket Matrix-formatted exports. A founding cohort of ten keeps a lifetime badge.

That’s the line. Not “predict perfectly,” not “beat the experts.” Predict less badly. Get a little better at gauging your own certainty. Track the difference between what you knew and what you thought you knew.

If that resonates, you’re probably in the right place.

Kruger·Dunning is built and run by Noah Fleury, a solo operator with too many opinions about college basketball and a soft spot for bracketologists who’ve been doing this work for years without good tools.

Reach out: press@krugerdunning.com. For bracketologist applications, founding-cohort questions, partnerships, press inquiries, security reports, or to tell us we’re wrong about something.

Predictive metrics come from Bart Torvik’s T-Rank. Resume metrics come from the official NCAA NET rankings. Spreads for The Seven come from The Odds API. Historical bubble data is drawn from public Selection Committee records.

We owe a particular nod to Bracket Matrix, which has tracked the bracketology community for over a decade and remains the credibility standard. Bracketologists who appear there get auto-verified on Kruger·Dunning with credit linking back.