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bballjunkee212
Joined: 07 Nov 2004
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 Posted: 03/18/08 6:23 pm ::: What is the impact of tournament seeding? |
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In its most basic form, I can see that seeding a tournament will assure that that best teams don't face each other early, which is good for fan involvement and permits greater play of the "x" factor (injuries, key calls, etc.). But ultimately, will seeding-- and here, I'm talking specifically about wcbb-- ever prevent the strongest teams from advancing to say, the Sweet 16, or allow a weaker team to advance to that level? Take any bracket and reverse the seeds. All else being equal, wouldn't we expect the 1 and 2-- now 16 and 15 respectivelly-- to get to the regional final? Wouldn't we expect those strongest teams to advance, even if they had the most unfavorable travel schedule for the tournament?
Not as a point of contention, but of information, has there ever been a case where a team had a clear seeding advantage over a stronger team, and both beat that stronger team and its next opponent?
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beknighted
Joined: 11 Nov 2004
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| Posted: 03/18/08 9:56 pm ::: Re: What is the impact of tournament seeding? |
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| bballjunkee212 wrote: |
In its most basic form, I can see that seeding a tournament will assure that that best teams don't face each other early, which is good for fan involvement and permits greater play of the "x" factor (injuries, key calls, etc.). But ultimately, will seeding-- and here, I'm talking specifically about wcbb-- ever prevent the strongest teams from advancing to say, the Sweet 16, or allow a weaker team to advance to that level? Take any bracket and reverse the seeds. All else being equal, wouldn't we expect the 1 and 2-- now 16 and 15 respectivelly-- to get to the regional final? Wouldn't we expect those strongest teams to advance, even if they had the most unfavorable travel schedule for the tournament?
Not as a point of contention, but of information, has there ever been a case where a team had a clear seeding advantage over a stronger team, and both beat that stronger team and its next opponent? |
Well, if you reversed the seeding exactly, you'd have the same seeding, just with different numbers. 
As for the other question, some of it depends on what a team's goals are. For a team that wants to get to the second round, being given a 10 instead of a 9, or a 7 instead of an 8 is significant. At slightly higher levels of ambition, you can do the same analysis with 5s and 6s or 6s and 7s.
For teams with championship aspirations, it's more a matter of probabilities. One reason Tennessee was upset the 2006 seeding was that, all things being equal, it's harder to beat the team right below you on the S-curve than the team 6 spots below you (and, of course, it's easier to beat the team right above you on the S-curve than the team 3 spots ahead of you).
Granted, bad seeding benefits exactly the number of teams it hurts, as it's a zero-sum game. However, as a matter of equity, you'd want the benefits to go to the teams that had earned them, not teams that got them for arbitrary reasons.
Your last question also raises a related issue - sometimes the big beneficiary of a seeding problem is not the immediate opponent, but the team that was supposed to play the team that got hosed. And I don't have an example of a team that got a seeding advantage and took advantage of it in the next round. However, there are plenty of examples of teams that have been hurt by getting underseeded opponents. The one closest to my heart is Rutgers in 2001, when the committee gave Southwest Missouri State a 5 seed instead of the 4 (or even 3) that the Lady Bears deserved. The Lady Bears beat Rutgers and then got a vulnerable Duke team in the regional semis on their way to the FF. Maybe RU wouldn't have beaten Duke, but the results suggest pretty strongly that the Scarlet Knights would have had a good chance.
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bballjunkee212
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beknighted
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| Posted: 03/19/08 9:02 am ::: Re: What is the impact of tournament seeding? |
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| bballjunkee212 wrote: |
| beknighted wrote: |
Well, if you reversed the seeding exactly, you'd have the same seeding, just with different numbers.
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Would it? I was under the impression that lower seeding would affect where you play. For example, UConn as a 16-seed would no longer have the benefit of playing in relatively close, friendly territory, and might be forced to play round one out west somewhere. I just figured stuff like that was involved in altering the seedings. |
Okay, take my one joke seriously.
If they simply reversed the seeds and followed the S-curve religiously, I think there would be very little effect. The pairings would remain the same and the subregional assignments would be changed very little, partly because of the requirement to put host teams at home and partly because the bottom of the bracket is seeded geographically now anyway. There might be some effect at the regional level, at least in terms of placement, but on average it might not be much of a big deal. (Honestly, there aren't going to be 8,000 screaming UConn fans in Greensboro, so sending the Huskies to Spokane wouldn't make that much difference.)
If they followed their current practices, two elements of those practices could change things a lot. First, today they move the 14-16 seeds up and down to keep them close to home, on the theory that they're going to lose anyway. If you flipped the S-curve, that would mean that the lineups at the top and the bottom could change meaningfully, and that current 1 seeds could be in the same region, while some current 3 seeds might not face any 1 seeds in their regions. This wouldn't affect the first couple of rounds too much (although there would be some potential consequences if current 6s face current 1s instead of current 3s or current 7s or 8s gets 3s instead of 1s), but it would scramble the 3rd and later rounds. Second, they'd place the current 16-13 seeds using their strange geographical theories, and the current 1-4 seeds presumably would end up following those pairings. That would affect regional locations, although, as I said above, I'm not sure how much difference that makes in the usual case.
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