Welcome

This all began as a simple idea. Two sports enthusiasts that met at the Univ. of Northern Iowa and became long time friends, wanted to bump their love of sports up to the next level. That idea evolved into the Brown Woods Index. The BWI was born in March of 2008. We created a formula that compared multiple college basketball statistics and assigned a value to each team. The BWI rolled out just in time for March Madness that year and surprisingly, to us anyway, correctly predicted the Kansas Jayhawks to win the NCAA Tournament. A year later, we dusted off the BWI and went the next step. We used it to predict all the the conference tournaments, the NIT, and the NCAA Tourney. The BWI correctly picked 11 of the 31 conference winners. The NIT was a complete disaster and doesn't even warrant mentioning. For the Big Dance, we had three of the Final 4 and correctly had North Carolina bringing home the crown. We submitted the BWI bracket on the ESPN Tournament Challenge and finished in the 97.6 percentile, not to mention we walloped Golic and Greenberg. We created a website, thesportstew.com, to post our brackets so others could follow along. We both had so much fun doing this, we decided to expand our website so we can dabble in blogging, podcasts, twitter, and other new technologies. Well they're new to us anyway. Keep checking back as there will be plenty of fun ahead.