Self-proclaimed geek Jerry Palm took an unconventional path to sports stardom emerging as the Oracle of NCAA postseason play

Sit Jerry Palm (S’85) down to talk about the story of how he became one
of college sports media’s most prominent names, and he can’t go more than a few minutes without using the word “geek” or some variation thereof. 

But the computer science graduate and “All-American” Marching Band alumnus takes a certain pride in being a novelty in his field. “I’m just about the only person in a press box with a degree in computer science,” Palm says. “And I’m just about the only person in a press box who went to Purdue, unless I’m at a Purdue game.”

A born and bred Boilermaker — he and his dad, also Jerry (ECE’64), have both served terms as president of the Purdue Alumni Club of Chicago — Palm was a high school math champion from the Chicago suburbs. He took so many math classes in college that he jokes about nearly double-majoring in the subject “by accident.” That affinity for numbers, coupled with his lifelong love of sports and savvy with emerging technology, has helped make him an authority on college basketball’s and college football’s postseason selection processes, whether it be basketball’s NCAA Tournament or football’s bowl season, notably its College Football Playoff championship structure.

Palm’s primary platform is CBS, for which he’s now a full-time contributor to its online and broadcast interests. But since moving into media after 17 years as a programmer and analyst — first for the law firm of Kirkland and Ellis, then for Bank of America — Palm’s contributed to Fox, USA Today, Big Ten Network, and Sporting News, as well. He makes scores of radio appearances, coast to coast, per year, topping out, he estimates, at around 40 per week during football season, more during basketball. And Palm’s omnipresent on social media. His favorite part of the job, he says, is interacting with @jppalmCBS’s 38,000 or so followers on Twitter, doing so with a sharp wit and endearing self-deprecating nature. Such personality isn’t always common in the number-crunching community. 

Palm’s made a name for himself largely with his expertise of the NCAA Tournament selection process. It’s that credibility that’s made him one of the most closely followed “bracketologists,” code for those who forecast the NCAA Tournament field on the Internet, but a term Palm distances himself from for its “grossly medical” connotations. Whether he likes the term or not, it’s a label given to those who know the most about NCAA Tournament selection, and so one he’s earned. He’s demonstrated his expertise in such a way that long-time Sporting News college basketball columnist Mike DeCourcy used the term “savant” to describe it.

For Palm, this all started in a library, sometime around 1993, after he read a Sporting News article about the NCAA’s Ratings Percentage Index formula, a mechanism designed to rate and rank teams taking into account strength of schedule. Today, the NCAA publishes its RPI. Back then, it did not. So for fun and to learn some new technology, Palm worked to replicate it, producing a version slightly different from the NCAA’s, not because he was adding to it or changing it, but because he didn’t have access to the complete equation. Palm took to that library, where he mined game results from newspaper agate pages, then entered them by hand into his program. It was a labor of love, the results of which he wanted to share.

His timing was impeccable. Palm was not the only analyst replicating the RPI back then, but he was the only one who took his to the fledgling Internet.

He posted his data on Newsgroups, the crude initial iteration of online interaction. When AOL came along, it allowed for a more aesthetically pleasing, but still painfully basic, platform for Palm’s work. “I was thinking nobody would care,” Palm remembers. “Or maybe enough people to comfortably fit in my minivan would care about something like that. It was geeky.”

“I was thinking nobody would care,” Palm remembers. “Or maybe enough people to comfortably fit in my minivan would care about something like that. It was geeky.”

Some did care. Some sent Palm e-mails asking for more frequent updates. Others were so bold as to request personalized reports. But it wasn’t the number of people interested that wound up mattering most; it was who in particular was interested. In 1995, David Jones, who’s long covered Penn State for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, came across Palm’s work during a season in which the Nittany Lions were bound for only their second NCAA Tournament since 1965. “He was completely different from anyone who’d really done anything like this,” Jones remembers.

Jones incorporated Palm’s work into his own, bringing it from an obscure corner of the emerging World Wide Web into the mainstream. Suddenly, Jones wasn’t the only reporter calling. Many others joined in, not only because Palm’s information was interesting, but because he was cooperative and both willing and able to explain complex concepts simply, unlike others doing such analytics. “I don’t think I could have stopped it,” Palm joked. “I could have unplugged my phone, locked my doors, and rolled up in the fetal position and sportswriters still would have found me. They’re very persistent.”

That exposure birthed Palm’s subscription-based website, CollegeRPI.com. Later, he added CollegeBCS.com, which covered college football’s Bowl Championship Series, which determined the schools that would play in the biggest bowl games, including the national championship. Palm’s journalistic breakthrough, if you want to call it that, came in 1998, the first year of the BCS system. As he did years earlier with basketball’s RPI, Palm worked to replicate the formula and forecast changes based on whatever scenarios might unfold.

In so doing, he discovered that BCS officials changed their formula in-season, a move that could easily have swayed the national title race on the fly that year. He took the story to Jones and after the two collaborated on a report that sent shock waves through college football, Palm spent part of his 1998 Thanksgiving break doing a live spot on ESPN’s SportsCenter. “I was wearing a polo shirt,” Palm said. “I’d never have worn that on TV, but they called that morning, and I didn’t have a lot of choice.”

It was a whirlwind, same as Palm’s move into media in general, a process that started in 2002, when he was laid off from his job as a programmer for Bank of America. “I got downsized,” Palm said. “We got bought by one bank too many, basically.” Funny how things work out. Instead of polishing his résumé, Palm traveled to Atlanta to the 2002 Final Four to confer with his new sportswriting friends to see whether a new career path might unfold. That’s exactly what happened.

“Maybe I don’t give myself enough credit, but I’ve basically fallen into a job that combines all my various passions. If 15-year-old me could have created a dream job, this probably would have been it,” Palm says. 

“I didn’t grow up wanting to be the RPI guy. I just shake my head sometimes when I think about how I ended up here. 

Everybody has complaints about their job, I guess, but I don’t have anything that wouldn’t just sound like whining. I’m very fortunate to have sort of found my way into this.”

Brian Neubert (LA’99) is a freelance writer.