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Message: [QUOTE="fieldystick, post: 5057619, member: 8152"] This is likely going to be a long, scattered post by me because I have a lot to say about all of this. To start, if you asked me to seed my current bracket 1-16, I would have it: #16 @ #1 #14 @ #2 #12 @ #3 #13 @ #4 #15 @ #5 #11 @ #6 #10 @ #7 #9 @ #8 The shuffling from straight 1-16 here is caused by two things: Utah @ Denver and trying to avoid conference games/regular season rematches. Unfortunately, in the 2-4 seeds trio, I could not find a way to avoid a regular season rematch for someone. Colgate@Syracuse, Towson@Hopkins, Richmond@Duke are all regular season rematches. Someone had to draw one since I couldn't send Richmond to Syracuse or Colgate to Duke. With that said, I do not think this bracket is too unrepresentative currently. However, Denver at #5 is about as low as they can go that I would be comfortable giving them Utah/Air Force as their first round opponent. - Potential issue on the horizon: It's easy to imagine a situation where Notre Dame is the #1 seed, Denver doesn't win the Big East AQ and falls to the #8 seed. Utah wins the ASUN AQ. The order of seeds 2-7 doesn't really matter here but say: Duke, Syracuse, Virginia, Hopkins, the Maryland/Penn State winner, and Ivy League champion (Yale/Cornell) are those 6 seeds in some order. The last 3 in the field/first 3 unseeded teams are: Maryland/Penn State loser, Yale/Cornell loser, and Georgetown. The play-in game participants are almost certainly going to be a fight to Notre Dame. There goes one flight. Utah is a flight to anywhere. Denver is a flight for everyone. Do they send Utah (~14th/15th in this 16 team field) to Denver in the 8/"9" game, or do they spring for the third flight? In my personal bracket, I would budge off 2 flights at this point to maintain a higher degree of matchup equity. - Overall, I think trying to limit costs in any sport is admirable. In a sport that is not overall self-sustaining currently/still growing, I think it's nearly vital. Most D1 men's teams are geographically clustered to the point where the flight rule doesn't have too big of an impact most years. It would be an extreme example, but imagine a situation where a straight 1-16 bracket gave us 5 flights. Or let the nerds like me mess with those pairings a little bit, flip a seed here and there... and we save ~100k on travel in the first round alone. (I pulled that number totally out of my behind, so I could be way off on how much travel/3 additional flights would cost for these programs.) Some of this is probably me being selfish because I like the puzzle of trying to put together the most sensible bracket possible within the constraints that the NCAA comes up with, but I also think there are long-term benefits to trying to keep costs down for now. [/QUOTE]

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