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Date Posted:13:10:52 03/15/12 Thu Author:No name Author Host/IP: 69.138.152.250 Subject: Re: NCAA basketball tournament question In reply to:
charles arey
's message, "NCAA basketball tournament question" on 11:40:23 03/15/12 Thu
>I used to follow college basketball even more closely
>than football but have sort of gotten away from it
>over the last 20 years, so I don't understand the
>following: why did South Florida and California have
>to play a preliminary game to get the #12 seed in
>their region? I understand why they have the four
>preliminary games (because they want 68 teams in the
>tournament instead of 64) but I do not understand why
>those games do not all feed into the #16 seeds. So if
>South Florida goes on to win the tournament they would
>have had to play one more game than would #13 Ohio,
>#14 Belmont, or #15 Detroit. This seems to penalize
>the higher-seeded teams.
The "First Four" is played between the four lowest automatic bid teams and the four lowest at large selections. Because Cal and USF play in higher quality leagues, they got seeded higher in the overall tournament than automatic bid teams from weaker leagues.
Basically, they're not all playing for 16 seeds because the last four at large teams in often rank ahead of several automatic bid teams.
