2.22.2006

Bracket Buzz

Andy Katz over at ESPN.com has some interesting behind-the-scenes knowledge on some frequently asked questions about how the committee makes selections for the NCAA tournament bracket. By far the most interesting of the answers for me concerns the seeding and locations, with two of the main venues at Washington and Philadelphia. Villanova and Georgetown could be the two teams that stand to gain the most from the selections.
    1. How do nonprotected teams get seeded geographically?
    A nonprotected tournament team is any team with lower than a top-five seed. What we're looking at here is, can a school like a No. 11- or 12- or 13-seeded Penn play in Philadelphia and ultimately have home-court advantage?

    The answer is that the top five seeds in each region are protected from having a home-court disadvantage in their first-round games. So a No. 11 seed could have a home-court advantage at a site like Philadelphia's Wachovia Center, but any seed lower than that cannot.
Is it too early to get excited about the tournament? Only if you are a curling fan.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey! Don't knock curling! We're in medal contention you know? :)

Matt said...

I am not knocking the curling, but praising it as the one of only two (half-pipe) sports that I have had any interest in watching. It might be also because curling happens to be on when I'm getting ready in the morning, but there's more to it. It has an eerie ability to draw you in with its slow, enticing movements.