Having trouble with your brackets? I've got your answer. Thanks to Coke Zero and the folks at Crispin Porter and Bogusky, a boutique creative design shop, you've now got Bracket-O-Matic. Just use the nifty sliders to select the values you think are important and voilà, you've got your bracket. But don't stop there. You can put that bracket right into the CBS Sports.com bracket (including the one you belong to with InformationWeek; password is biztech).

I can't vouch for its accuracy. It pulls its data from a variety of sources, including ESPN and the team Web sites; one of its parameters is based on a subjective rating of team mascots. Don't worry, you can flip this one off entirely ... but you have to admit, it's kind of fun and maybe the only way to determine if a Hoya will beat a Blue Devil (neither's a match for a Mississippi Valley State Delta Devil). I'm not quite sure what happens when a Memphis Tiger faces a Clemson Tiger, though. Or whether Butler's Bulldogs will be better than either the Mississippi State Bulldogs or the Drake Bulldogs or the Georgia Bulldogs, or even the Gonzaga Bulldogs. All three must be tougher than a Retriever (UMBC).

Let's not even begin to talk about Wildcats (Kansas State, Kentucky, Villanova, Davidson, Arizona, and that's not including Cougars and Panthers and Jaguars). Isn't Big Red (Cornell) a chewing gum? What happens if the Stanford Cardinal (singular) meets up with Louisville's Cardinals? I mean, many has to be better than one, doesn't it? What happens when a Runnin' Rebel (UNLV) faces a Patriot (George Mason)? A Viking (Portland State) battles a Trojan (USC)? And what is a Golden Flash (Kent State), and is that a 51st state? (Does anyone know what "Play In Winner's" mascot is?)

Anyone ready to poke fun at the Mountaineers (West Virginia) need only look to the Hilltoppers (Western Kentucky). If they meet, we'll clear out the old barn, Pappy will grab his fiddle, Ma will sew us up some uniforms, and we'll all sit on the hay bales and watch the hoedown. If you turn on ONLY mascots, the wild mascot winner is UNC over UCLA. For tame mascot, Memphis beats Kansas. Go figure that one out.

Uh, where'd I get off track?

Oh, sliders, Coke Zero. Yes. So I tried some scenarios. I heavied up on Cinderella, offense, wild mascot, edged toward senior leadership, deep bench, didn't really bother about the seeding, showed my West Coast bias, and didn't much care about coaching experience. Final Four: Washington State, Kent State, Oregon, and BYU, with Kent State winning it all. You read it here first. You can go back in and adjust the parameters to more reasonable levels. I got one that gave me UCLA, Memphis, and Georgetown, but still a St. Joseph's in the mix. The cool thing is you can override any of the picks, and the entire application is built on the idea that its user should be the one choosing the values that matter.

Coke Zero prototyped this last year, but refined it with descriptions of the categories and the ability to turn off certain filters (like mascot). Associate Creative Director Alex Burnard and Senior Integrated Producer Myke Gerstein built this flash application in just a few weeks after diagramming the logic on paper, including how tie breaking would work within the system. Once they loaded the initial data, they adjusted some of the parameters from there. All of the data analysis was custom written.

As for the parameters, the team used some of their own logic. So for star power, they took a percentage of the team's total points scored by a single player using regular season statistics. Since this is really its first true year, they have not put in any historical data to gauge the accuracy. While I'd quibble with many of the definitions, this is really meant to be a mass application, not for the basketball stat nerds. It's also fantastic for those of us who enter many pools and want to switch up our results to hedge our bets.

And if you're going by mascot alone, who can argue with the Saints (Siena)?