The story of the tournament so far has been the lack of major upsets. The lowest seed still remaining is #7 UNLV, and many strong teams survived the tournament's first weekend. I watched Penn play Texas A&M live, but missed a lot of the other action. Here are a few of my thoughts on the tournament: 1) If the seeding committee wanted to design the bracket so every higher-seeded team would win every game, they would set it up differently from the way it is now. They would set it up as 1 vs 9 5 vs 13 3 vs 11 7 vs 15 2 vs 10 6 vs 14 4 vs 12 8 vs 16 Which means that the current arrangement isn't as high-seed friendly as it could be, and which means that lower seeds (like Penn) can complain they had to play too difficult of a team, and the committee can say, "The higher seeds won every game, clearly our seeding process was good" and they can both be somewhat right. 2) Has anyone tested to see if the committee suffers from a recency effect in seeding teams (Syracuse gets a 5 last year, A&M gets a 3 this year, Oregon gets a 3) for the tournament? It could be tested with win percentage in the conference tourney vs. performance against the seed expectation. I think win percentage alone is over-rated by the committee. There are strong teams that play tough schedules and lose some games (North Carolina), and teams that get lucky and win more than they should against average teams (Long Beach State). 3) Can the preponderance of higher seeds getting to the Sweet 16 can be explained through the same probability as last year's brackets, or was the chance made more likely by the NBA age rules change? I hypothesize that the disparity between the best teams and the average teams in college basketball was made greater by the presence of players who would have jumped straight to the NBA, but instead played a year of college ball. 4) Tourney pools should give points for correctly picking teams to lose games in the tourney. For example I may pick Wisconsin to lose in the second round to GT, which may be because I think GT is good or it may be because I think Wisconsin will choke against whoever they play. So if Wisconsin ends up losing to UNLV, I think you should still be able to earn points in your pool. Otherwise if you have a team still 'alive' in your bracket vs. a team that you called incorrectly (say I picked Duke to play UCLA in the Sweet 16) even if you think the team that's still 'alive' is going to lose, you should pick them to win cause it's your only chance at getting points. 5) I really enjoy reading Ken Pomeroy's website, if only because they employ statistics and analysis to justify their opinions, rather than talking off the cuff. Here's an explanation of what he does at his website.

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