Sunday, March 16, 2014

Mis-Seedings in the NCAA Tournament

Here's some of the overseeded/underseeded teams, at least according to one analysis by the Prediction Machine.  There's a lot of mis-seeding in the lower seeds because most of the automatic invites down there wouldn't even be 16 seeds in the PM's book, but I'm ignoring those.
UMass!!  should be a 15, was a 6 (-9)
St. Louis should be a 10, was a 5 (-5)
Colorado should be a 13, was an 8 (-5)
St. Joseph's should be a 15, was a 10 (-5)
New Mexico State should be an "18", was a 13 (-5)
Syracuse should be a 7, was a 3 (-4)
On the other end of the stick:
Iowa should be a 4, was an 11 (+7)
Oklahoma St. should be a 2, was a 9 (+7)
Tennessee should be a 5, was an 11 (+6)
Ohio State should be a 2, was a 6 (+4)
Harvard should be a 9, was an 11 (+2) 

The Iowa/Tennessee mis-rating is particularly interesting.  The two most underseeded teams play each other, and then the winner gets UMass, the most overseeded team in the tournament.  Similarly we get underseeded tOSU against overseeded Syracuse in the second round.  Of course, the most egregious mistake might be Louisville as a 4 seed.  And overseeded St. Louis gets them in the second round.

I'm tempted to say that the Committee was intentionally stacking the seeding to create "upsets".

Here are the teams that the Committee got right:
Florida
Arizona
Villanova
Creighton
UCLA
Cincinnati
Oregon
Stanford
Xavier
For whatever reason, the Committee seems to have had the clearest vision of the Pac-12 teams.

UCLA (my team) got a pretty favorable draw for the first two rounds.  Then they run into their old nemesis Florida, a match-up I'm sure the Committee considered when laying out the regions.

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