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[QUOTE="jncuse, post: 4202683, member: 1969"]
The Pac-12 seemed like the worst P5 conference last year and then absolutely dominated in the NCAA tournament.

The following is based on observation, I have no numbers to back it up:
The system favours conferences that as a whole played the best before the end of December.   And that is ultimately the fairest way to do things since how can you tell which conference is improving once they are only playing themselves.   You can't.  But what sometimes happens is that the 4th or 5th place team in "great" conference that gets a 4 seed is not as good as other 4 seeds.

My advice is don't pick your brackets based on the one or two conferences that get the most seeds or those that hog the top 4/5 seed lines.   Those conferences on a "per school" basis have tended to do worse and proportionately have more flops before the sweet 16.. and this is not a new trend.  Think back to the when the Big East got a huge # of seeds.  They had some national titles, but a higher proportion than others of flops as well.   (thanks Pitt, Georgetown and Notre Dame!).  This has happened when the Big Ten has been very good, or the years where the New Big East and Big 12 get a high % of their teams in.
 
 If the above sounds confusing, I'll give an example:

Team A - 3 or 4 seed from Power Conference with 8 bids and 5 teams in the top 5 seed lines
Team B - 3 or 4 seed from Power Conference with 5 bids and 2 teams in the top 5 seed lines

Team A has tended to flop earlier than Team B.
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