Bracket Thoughts

Some general notes on the bracket before I dive into the Stanford-Cornell pairing:

1. As some have noted, the committee did a really, really bad job of creating interesting mid-major vs. high-major matchups. Consider this: in the bracket, there are seven teams seeded 8 or better that are not from a Big Six conference.

Guess how many of those are playing major-conference opponents. Answer: two. One of those is the bizarre Xavier-Georgia matchup which came about because of an automatic bid. The other one is an 8-9 game.

Quite frankly, this bugs me. It seriously limits the number of predicted mid-over-high wins in the tournament. It's very possible-- depending on the matchups-- that there may not be a single game in the tournament where a non-BCS team other than Memphis or Xavier is actually a favorite over a BCS team.

It took me literally a minute to figure out a scenario where Drake plays Villanova instead of Western Kentucky. (Switch those two, then switch UConn and Vandy.) Butler-South Alabama could have been fixed (and another anomaly avoided, see below) by simply flipping Arizona and USA! Arkansas and Kent State can then be flipped to eliminate another needless mid-mid pairing.

I don't have much of a problem with treating Xavier and Memphis like high-majors, since they basically are. Ditto Gonzaga, which would easily be Davidson's biggest scalp in recent memory. But seriously... Drake-WKU? I thought BracketBusters was a month ago.

2. Someone please pass a rule exempting West Coast schools from the 9:30 AM time slot. Saint Mary's and Gonzaga are massively disadvantaged in their first-round games by this factor. (Gonzaga gets to play a semi-away game to boot... see below.) So is Portland State, if anyone cares. There's just no reason why those games have to be put in those time slots.

3. What looked like an anomaly last year (Louisville getting Texas A&M in Kentucky) now appears to be a full-blown, ugly trend. Far too many lower seeds are gaining advantages by receiving cushy draws close to home. It's not quite as bad as the women's tournament, where if you're lucky enough to host you get home games even if you're a 12 seed, but it's getting there. There are, depending on how you reckon it, between 4 and 6 "semi-home" games in the first round. 2-4 of those are #1 seeds. The others are a pair of #10 seeds, which is ludicrous.

Ultimately, these gaffes give the bracket an air of rushed carelessness, which is exactly what you'd expect. The committee had to create eight contingency plans for games on the last day. Is it any surprise that these weren't exactly well thought out?

It just makes no sense to me that the selection show has to immediately follow as soon as the last game is done. Seriously, CBS, would it kill you to give them a frigging hour to look things over and tweak the bracket to produce better matchups? I spent, max, 5 minutes figuring out a small number of bracket tweaks that would have made a far more interesting bracket (IMHO, of course). I understand that this year the conference tournaments were a perfect storm of nightmare scenarios (literally a perfect storm, in the SEC case), so I don't really blame the committee. I do blame CBS. Do they have such contempt for their viewers that they think an hour of pre-selection debate and discussion would destroy the show's audience? I just can't see that happening. People will tune in because they want to see where their team is playing, whether it's on at 3 pm, 4 pm or 4 am. (The latter not suggested for other reasons.)

Oh well. At least it makes my 7-10 upset picks easy.