The point of the tournament is to provide exciting games for the fans. So that there is a lot of fan interest and the tournament makes money. Determining a champion is part of building the excitement and engaging the fans. Having a bunch mismatches at the beginning of the tournament takes away from exciting games and does not really change who the champion will be. Flipping the seeds around probably does not really help that much for reasons that Atamasama suggests and also for reasons you suggest. It makes the tournament look like it is not doing a good job choosing a champion so fan engagement goes down.
In a footrace, does the agreed upon fastest runner get to start before the other runners? No, he/she doesn’t. So why should the agreed upon “best team” play the easiest opponent in a basketball tournament?
Change “footrace” to “car race” and the answer is yes.
That’s standard in most sports. The only reason footraces don’t do that is because they don’t have to; everyone can start on the same “starting line” more or less. But most sports don’t have that level of simplicity.
Soccer doesn’t always. Rather famously, most domestic cup tournaments are not seeded at all, and all matchups are the result of random draws. And, even in the seeded tournaments, the seeds are by groupings, but random within the grouping.
It’s only us Americans who think that 1 v 16 makes sense. And even we don’t do it in all things; 1 v 9, 2 v 10, 3 v 11, etc. is used in a number of different (though admittedly not “major”) sports and games.
I like the Major League Baseball playoffs and am glad that only 10 teams are involved, unlike half the league for NBA’s playoffs. I also like that the two wild card teams in each league have to play each other in a single-game death match to advance to the division series. If you complain about the pressure of a do-or-die game, then you should have won your division and avoided that fate.
Even for marathons, they let the elite runners go first, before the horde of scrubs.
With a single elimination tournament, seeding is the right choice. Yes, you get mismatches early on, but with a large field like in NCAA basketball mismatches are inevitable. Best to have them early rather than go random and have two really good teams play a knockout game in the first round.
Seeding also gives teams an incentive to be exceptional during the season rather than be just good enough to get in.
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The interesting thing about seeding is that although it does increase the #1 team’s chance of winning the tournament compared with a random draw, it is also the fairest method for ALL the teams in the competition. True, not seeding might ‘gift’ a lower-ranked team with an easier route to the final, but if so that will be at the expense of other lower-ranked teams who get a harder route. So seeding isn’t really about making it easier for the top teams, it’s about ensuring fairness for all teams. The top teams are going to be favoured in any system, because they are the top teams. A random draw just introduces… randomness, not fairness.
Virgina (representing the south region) and Texas Tech (representing the West) meet in the finals of March Madness on April 8th. It may be a great sporting event, but educationally (colleges still teach kids stuff, right) it seems little bonkers to me.
The only thing I don’t like about the Stanley Cup playoffs is the time of year it’s played. Hockey always feels the best to watch in the cold and dark of winter nights. I love watching hockey at home when it’s 10 degrees outside and the sun went down at about 5 o’clock.
It’s more difficult to get into the spirit of the game when it’s still sunny outside and my neighbor is mowing his lawn.