By Dylan Lewis, News Staff

The field of 64 is set, and come tip-off this afternoon at the First Niagara Center in Buffalo, March Madness — America’s annual two-and-a-half week stretch of cinderellas, cutting down nets and fan self-doubt — will be underway.

Your bracket should be filled out by now, but if you don’t have one yet, you can attempt to sidestep some of the insanity of trying to correctly pick all 63 games by using the Wall Street Journal’s annual “Blindfold Bracket.”

Available on WSJ.com for the fourth year, the program enables a user to sift through the field of 64 teams simply and fill out a bracket … blindly.

The system produces a back-of-the-baseball-card description for each team in the tournament, only unlike most baseball cards, the information is intentionally obscured. All teams have a goofy identifying nickname with more generalized details including:

• Tournament seed range – a two seed spread that indicates the strength of the team according to the NCAA’s selection committee, without giving away the team’s exact seed.

• RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) range – in increments of 10, it expresses strength of schedule ranking each team falls into relative to the rest of college basketball.

• Conference profile – Indicates whether the team plays in a High Major- Atlantic Coast Conference, Southeastern Conference, etc., Mid Major – Atlantic-10, Missouri Valley Conference, or Low Major – Great West, Big Sky Conference, etc.

WSJ’s analysts also provide a brief description of the team’s style of play, for example, it describes the “Museum Curators” as “Old-school center-guard combo leads frequent second-weekend tourney team; offensive rebounds lacking.”

Additionally, they rate each team on a five point scale in the areas of: offense, defense, rebounding, 3-point shooting, experience and whether the team was entering March Madness on a “hot streak.”

The interactive application has you pick each round matchup by matchup, and once you’ve completed the bracket-in-disguise, it unveils your picks, free of bias. The program prevents you from shooting down Syracuse early because you think Otto the Orange is creepy, or holding Villanova’s first-round exits the last two years against them in this year’s tournament. It creates a vacuum free of team-specific prejudice, and standardizes the selection process for fans.

I used the program, but held off on seeing my finished bracket, so I could later compare the two and see just how much they varied.

Then I filled out a regular bracket, using CBS’ platform, which provides plenty of data points for the casual fan, including actual RPI, strength of schedule, points per game, points allowed, etc. It also adds the percentage of individuals choosing each team in each matchup, in real-time. As of publication, 68 percent of CBS users selected Cincinnati to beat Harvard in their first round game.

When making my picks, if one team has a dramatically better RPI and its bolstered by a stronger of schedule, I push them through to the next round, with few exceptions. If it’s tight, I’ll analyze points per game/allowed to look at the strengths of their offense and defense, and maybe see if the differential tells a story about how emphatic their regular season wins were. If it’s still a toss-up, I consider the team’s leading scorer – come crunch time in a close game, I go with the proven star. It may sound like a carefully calibrated system, but the reality is a decent amount of intuition works its way into final decisions.

I worked my way to through each round and eventually wound up with #1 Florida, #4 Michigan State, #2 Michigan and #1 Arizona in my Final Four, with Arizona beating beating Florida in the National Championship – not exactly an earth shattering prediction, I’m aware.

Then I opened up my blind bracket. Much to my surprise, I also had #1 Florida, #4 Michigan State, #2 Michigan and #1 Arizona in my Final Four. Sweet validation. Even without the benefit of team names and specific data, my blind bracket mirrored the one I’d agonized over for an hour. Then I looked to the National Championship game to see the same matchup, Arizona vs. Florida, only this time I had the Wildcats beating the Gators.

Cue the Madness.