Thursday, March 26, 2009

Picking The Top Teams

With the hundreds of teams, dozens of conferences and the multiplicity of opinions, it is nothing short of amazing how much agreement has been garnered on which teams are considered the favorites, and make up the so-called 'sweet sixteen' in the NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT now in full swing.

While the winners and losers of individual games are difficult to pick with any consistency, the degree of agreement on which teams comprise this surviving field of 16 is quite remarkable.
Consider this;
After two elimination rounds of games, during which the field has been reduced from 64, all the teams remaining were initially seeded among the top four of their respective brackets, except for 2 teams.
That means the 'experts' were right in their selections 87.5% of the time!
The two exceptions were Purdue [a 5 seed which beat Washington, a 4 seed] and Arizona [a 12 seed which beat Cleveland State, a 13 seed, which had beaten another 4 seed, Wake Forest]

To be able to sort through all these teams and seed them that accurately is nothing short of amazing!
Of course, any further predictions are problematic at best, but remember last year? All four number 1 seeds made it to the Final Four! That could easily happen again this year, but who knows?

Today begins the next contests, as per below:

Midwest
1 U Louisville
12 ARIZONA

3 Kansas U
2 Michigan State U

West
1 CONNECTICUT
5 PURDUE

3 MISSOURI
2 MEMPHIS

East
1 PITTSBURGH
4 XAVIER

3 VILLANOVA
2 DUKE

South
1 U NORTH CAROLINA
4 GONZAGA

3 SYRACUSE
2 OKLAHOMA

Care to make any predictions?
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