Friday, March 19, 2004 :::
Some bracket notes- At one point I had Duke, a 1-seed, in the championship game in my bracket for the Kitchen Cabinet, while I had UConn, a two seed, in the same spot in my pick for a contest that doesn't weight by seed. This seems odd, and I ultimately changed it, but the reason was relatively straightforward: I was picking 3-seed NC State to make it to the Final Four in the KC bracket. The anomaly was created by the rule that one pick a team to win a game that one also picked to play in that game; this simple constraint makes the contest much more complicated. (More so in Kate Malcolm's seed-weighted bracket than in the traditional contests, where the teams one would typically choose for each line will tend to follow the constraint automatically -- though not always. Bonus points for picking a low seed will often make it worth picking the upset in the short term, but if the low seed does win, they are then less likely to progress than a higher seed would be.)
- I didn't know until Sunday night that the traditional region names for the 16-team blocks had been dropped in favor of the names of the cities in which the "regional finals" (do we still call them that?) are played. (Hence the East Rutherford regional, instead of the East.) Presumably they felt the old monikers were inconsistent with the new "pod" system, in which the tournament committee really consists of aliens who only look human. Or rather games are asigned to first round locations without regard to the "regional" in which it's taken place; both may be true. Anyway, I think it's far worse for, say, Denver to host an Atlanta pod than for them to host a South regional pod. If they don't like the traditional region names, call them red, blue, green, and white. (The women, whose first two rounds are at campus sites, continue to use East, West, MidEast, and MidWest.)
::: posted by dWj at 9:32 AM
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