How Joe Lunardi went from ‘PR guy’ at St. Joe’s to the master of March Madness bracketology

Pam Miller’s date kept canceling.

“I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on,” she said. “I thought I might be getting a run for my money.”

Pam wasn’t being stood up, though. Her date had a valid excuse. He was following the 1981-82 St. Joseph’s men’s basketball team that kept winning and advancing in the East Coast Conference.

The Hawks went on to win the ECC and earn a bid to the NCAA Tournament. Pam’s date, Joe Lunardi, was covering the beat for the school paper, The Hawk, and rescheduled to after the team’s first-round exit against Northeastern.

“We didn’t get together until April 1,” said Pam, now Pam Lunardi.

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Now, Joe Lunardi is synonymous with March Madness itself.

Everyone also knows the 63-year-old Lunardi as “Joey Brackets,” the nickname he earned as the longtime ESPN personality who coined the term “bracketology” with his in-season predictions for which teams would make the men’s NCAA Tournament, which teams were on the bubble, and which teams were out. Hearing his name this time of year is as common as a “Go Birds” on a fall Sunday.

It’s hard to think of one without the other, but anyone familiar with his background knows there is one more facet of Joe Lunardi that cannot be separated from him: his history at St. Joe’s.

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With two older brothers who were Hawks, Lunardi was quickly exposed to the school. Some of his earliest memories featured his brother, who played in the St. Joe’s band, babysitting him during a game in the late 1960s.

“He went and played in the band, and I watched the game by myself. I sat with my little program, kept stats or whatever,” Lunardi said. “Who knew that 50 years later, I’m still doing the same thing?”

Once Lunardi arrived on campus nearly a decade later as a public administration major, he was more known for his street hockey skills than his writing chops. But he had dreams of working for Sports Illustrated. St. Joe’s did not have a communications major or a journalism school to support this, so his experience came from elsewhere.

“I didn’t know it then, but I was majoring in college basketball,” Lunardi said.

The St. Joe’s band once again played a role in jump-starting his career.

“Typically, the sports editor covered the basketball team because it was a beat that people cared the most about, right? Well, he was the drummer, and he wanted to be the drummer,” Lunardi said. “He asked me to take basketball as a freshman, so I was the basketball beat writer for four years.”

Lunardi’s early hustle didn’t go unnoticed by staffers like then-athletic director Don DiJulia.

“There was a willingness to do his best, to jump in, to be as expressive and communicative as he is,” DiJulia said. “Certainly that went a long way in launching his career and what he’s doing now.”

But even in the 1980s, Lunardi was dreaming of a career in broadcasting.

“The people on the electronic side, we thought they were the pretty boys with the poofy hair and the makeup. We were the ink-stained, hardworking, ‘Get to the heart of the story right on deadline’ types,” Lunardi said. “But [broadcasting was] what I wanted. That’s what I want to be in.”

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Being with Joe Lunardi since the early stages of his journey, Pam found herself learning about the world of college basketball with her husband.

“He’s always been writing about sports, has always been interested about sports, and he’s always been pursuing the next step,” she said. “[He’s been] a sportswriter, and now a broadcaster, since I’ve known him, so that’s a really long time.”

By the time he graduated in 1982, Lunardi was working as a freelance sportswriter. He returned to St. Joe’s to work in admissions before working at Temple for several years. Finally, he returned to St. Joe’s and worked his way up to vice president for marketing and communications.

“I learned how to be a PR guy by the seat of my pants,” Lunardi said. “Thirty-some years later, we had a 20-person marketing communications office with a web staff and digital communication staff and the printed St. Joe’s magazine and all of our advertising and our image campaign and branding.”

Shortly after his return, St. Joe’s launched its radio network, the St. Joseph’s Sports Network, something DiJulia saw Lunardi fitting into.

“That gave him early experience to polish up his approach and gave him another reason to be in touch with athletes or coaches immediately,” DiJulia said.

Lunardi also was able to gain more exposure by working for St. Joseph’s network.

“Many of the other Jesuit schools had a great head start on us in that area. I was able to go pick their brains when I traveled with the team for radio,” Lunardi said. “If we were at Fordham or St. Louis, or wherever, I would go visit these schools, and, in a way, it was like an incubator and a professional network outside.”

But even while working in the university’s marketing department, Lunardi said he “never really stopped being a sportswriter.” He was contributing to the Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook on the side, which gave way to his career in bracketology.

In 1995, the Blue Ribbon added a postseason NCAA Tournament guide, and thus bracketology was born. The year after Blue Ribbon’s inaugural tournament guide, Lunardi began projecting the field for ESPN.com. He pivoted to solely doing bracketology for ESPN in 1998 and has been a fixture on the network ever since, with The Bracketology Show debuting on ESPN+ during the 2019-20 season.

“I just laugh,” former St. Joe’s coach Phil Martelli said, “because there was a guy who took his passion for basketball, his intellect for numbers, figured out the system that the NCAA was using, and created this world where he’s known as the bracketologist.

“I’m not a cliché guy, but when they say good things should happen to good people, Joe Lunardi is good people.”

But Lunardi’s success was not simply luck. After all, one has to earn the title “Mr. Bracketology.”

Pam believed it was her husband’s accuracy in his predictions that enabled him to gain traction, especially given the little time he had to make them and the lack of sophisticated technology when he was starting out.

“He got to be known for predicting the field of the tournament accurately, and I’m not sure anyone had really tried before. I’m not sure anybody really cared about it as much as he did,” she said. “Once he started doing it, that was [when] people took notice.”

And from there, things took off.

“It’s opened up a lot of opportunities for him,” Pam said. “A lot of professional friendships now with other sports journalists. He’s connected with so many people at ESPN. He’s gotten involved with Coaches vs. Cancer and does a lot of charity work for them, and that has become an opportunity because of the people he’s met through college basketball. He’s very well-recognized and very capable at what he does, and also, of course, our whole family has been built around it.”

Just like their first date more than 40 years ago, Pam said the difficulty that accompanies seeing her husband this time of year has not gone away, comparing him to an accountant during tax season. Now, it’s just on a larger scale.

But even as the world changed around during Lunardi’s rise to sports stardom, Pam said he hasn’t.

“He’s really the same person,” Pam said. “He works unbelievably hard.”

The other thing that remained constant: Lunardi’s connection to his alma mater.

“It was just spectacular to watch because it was somewhat organic; it grew and people started talking about this bracket expert,” Martelli said. “He did all the right things. He did every radio station. He worked really hard.”

HawkTalk, the irreverent radio show featuring Martelli and Lunardi, sticks out in the coach’s memory.

“I took my job and Joe took his job very [seriously], but we didn’t take ourselves [seriously],” Martelli said.

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The show was just one of many ways Lunardi promoted the school and his connection to it.

“Joe Lunardi has been Hawked either through the legacy of the family or the water in the air at home and the water in the air when he was on campus. There’s no question,” DiJulia said. “By that, I mean he believes in what the university stands for and is proud to talk about all the good things it does and tries to do and is a good spokesman for it.”

In fact, one of the only times Lunardi wasn’t promoting the school was when he was making his bracket midway through the 2003-04 season. Despite later having the Hawks as a No. 1 seed, Lunardi did not want to be accused of being a “homer.”

“I remember when he told me that, we got to have a really good laugh about it because he knew and I knew that that was one of the best teams and proved to be one of the best teams in the country,” Martelli said.

Lunardi has seen St. Joe’s through highs and lows. And despite his busy schedule, especially during this time of year, he’s still not ready to walk away from doing color analysis for a program his wife describes as “part of him.”

“I’ve thought about it many times — when should I stop doing St. Joe’s games? — and I still like it too much,” Lunardi said. “It’s a way to represent my school and stay connected to something that was in my professional DNA for 35 years.”

Said DiJulia: “It’s like having a Bryce Harper, or a movie star, or Billy Joel, or Bruce Springsteen. [In] his profession, that’s who he is. For good or for bad, it’s who he is. And where’s he from? St. Joe’s University.”