A Sports Championship In Its Purest Form

In recent years, I've become increasingly interested in the NCAA March Madness tournament for Men's Basketball in the U.S. I don't really follow the NCAA results throughout the season, but once the tournament-of-64 starts, both Vicki and I tend to become big fans.

One of the reasons for that, I think, is the format that they use. It's 64 teams, across 4 brackets. Each bracket has 16 teams in it, ranked 1st through 16th. In the 1st round (which starts in about 2 hours from right now), the following occurs in each bracket:

• # 16 plays # 1
• # 15 plays # 2
• # 14 plays # 3
• ...
• # 9 plays # 8

I love the perfect symmetry of that setup. (Recently, the # 64 overall position is determined by having a pre-tournament match between the 64th and 65th placed teams, as a bit of a lead-in to the round-of-64 itself.)

Also, each game will have a winner and a loser (using short overtime periods, if needed), and each winner will advance, while each loser goes home. By the 2nd round, there will be 32 teams, and then 16 for the 3rd round, 8 for the 4th round, "the final 4" make it to the 5th round, and then two teams play for the championship in the Final (i.e. the 6th round). Computer geeks and fans of binary counting systems in general can't help but hail such a beautiful structure! Because of this arrangement, every single game matters. Although no # 16 team has ever beaten a top seed (and, therefore, no # 16 team has ever advanced to the 2nd round), there have been several instances of # 15 upsetting # 2. Imagine the shame of such a fate if your team was considered one of the best in the country and you didn't make it out of the 1st round!

Pretty much the only thing I don't like about the way the tournament is structured is that they don't re-arrange and re-assign the teams after each round. What I mean by that is that I wish they would take whatever teams survive, put them in order within their bracket (highest seed to lowest seed) and then determine the next round's matchups by pitting the top against the bottom, and so on. They don't do that, but instead set the matchups ahead of time (eg. the winner of the 1-vs-16 game will play the winner of the 8-vs-9 game, the winner of the 2-vs-15 game will play the winner of the 7-vs-10 game, and so on). Now, there are good reasons for that approach, including reducing travel for the (university) teams involved. But I also suspect that another contributing rationale is to facilitate the "March Madness Pools" that spring up all over, and as a non-gambler myself that doesn't carry a lot of weight with me! At any rate, I don't like the fact that a highly ranked team sometimes gets a tougher opponent (on paper, at least) than a lower ranked team gets, in the 2nd round. To see how this might happen, imagine that # 15 beat # 2 in the 1st round. Instead of then having to face # 1, that # 15 team will draw the winner of the 7-vs-10 game, while the # 3 team (assuming that it made it out of the 1st round) could end up playing # 11. In that scenario, # 1 got screwed (playing # 8, in comparison to # 3 drawing # 11) and # 15 got off easy. I'd prefer to see # 15 have to take on # 1 as that just seems more fair to me.

Anyway, it should be another interesting tournament. Looking at some stats this morning, I see that, over the 24 years in which they've had 64 contestants in the 1st round, the # 8 teams have actually lost more opening round games than the # 9 teams have (by a difference of about 8%)! # 12 is also not a terrible place to be, as fully 1/3 of those teams have managed to pull off what is really quite an impressive upset by beating their much higher-ranked opponents at the # 5 spot.