On February 11, Duke lost its fourth straight game, to Maryland. That same night, Syracuse beat St. John's to end a string of four losses in five games. Judging from the commentary at the time, both teams were at risk of missing the NCAA tournament. Fortunately for them, the tournament selection committee was going to wait another month to make its decision. Duke and Syracuse are now both in good position to make the field of 64. Neither will be a favorite to win it all, but perhaps they can help win something else for the rest of us: The end of sports media obsession with predicting the future.

On Feb. 10, ESPN.com's Bubble Watch had Duke as "should be in," and Syracuse with "work left to do." Now Duke is a lock and Syracuse "should be in." In the interim, every SportsCenter college-basketball segment, every broadcast of a college-basketball game, and print coverage of every game is focused entirely on who's in and who's out. Who cares? You don't know, you won't know, you can't know until all the games have been played—hence the rising fortunes of the Blue Devils and Orange(men), and the concurrent fading fortunes of Oklahoma State, Clemson, and Indiana. And even once all the games have been played, predicting the vagaries of the selection process is impossible (or so you'd think scribes might have learned after they got a chance to try to place the field of 65 into a bracket earlier this month).

Then, once the bracket has been set and we finally know who the bubble teams are and not just who they should be, they tend to lose pretty early in the tournament and be forgotten for good. I wrote as much in 2005, updated it before last year's tourney, and last year the five big-conference bubble teams won a total of three games, all in the first round. Bubble teams (seeded 9-12 from big conferences) are the obsession of sportscasters in February, irrelevant in March.

(There are also unnecessary statements of precision about the top teams. Back in December, Sports Illustrated called Ohio State "the team to beat," a decision the article's own writer questioned later, attributing it to the headline writer. It was a sad reminder of the same magazine's statement in November that Ohio State's football team was "the best. period." Florida had a different opinion.)

Sports commentators are obsessed with what can be, rather than enjoying the present. Signing day and the NFL draft, when football players are allocated to college and pro teams, are celebrated and anticipated for as long as actual championship games. Everyone's lining up now to make baseball predictions that will be forgotten at first pitch in April. NBA commentators are already looking ahead to a Mavs-Suns Western conference finals matchup (the Spurs and Jazz be damned, or at least forgotten, apparently).

It'd be one thing if we were any good at predicting sports events. But as ESPN.com's Gregg Easterbook has shown, NFL predictions stink. Sports Illustrated's fantasy-football predictions are questionable. And as I wrote a couple of years ago, predictions about the college-basketball tournament are often pretty disastrous. (That was for a year that played to type, with North Carolina beating Illinois; last year's tournament defied all expectations, with no top seeds making the Final Four.)