The session with the fewest amount of seats left for sale on Stubhub is the Gonzaga game in Salt Lake City with less than 100 tickets left. The Cuse and Cal session is pretty close in San Jose with just over 200 left. The one session that by far has the most left (almost twice of anyone else) with over 1500 seats for sale is the Georgetown session in Philadelphia. As much as we can blame the Georgetown fans, they are matched up with Florida Gulf Coast, Oklahoma and San Diego State, so not much for fans from those schools to show up. Since I have tickets still for sale for that session, poor job by the NCAA seeding those teams into Philly.
No excuse to put San Diego State in Philly or Cuse in San Jose when there are eight sites available. I think the three time zone rule needs to be invoked.
Three points:
1. Committee was totally correct to put Syracuse in San Jose (based on where Syracuse was on S-Curve). The 16 top teams must fill out the 8 locations. The rule is quite simple -- work your way down the s-curve and give each team its closest location. Georgetown gets first dibs. Once you get down the 4 line you are left with leftover pods. Syracuse got what was left.
2. The committee did not make a mistake. But the issue is with the NCAA continously putting too many pod sites out west, when there is a lack of top 4 and at large teams out there. For the last 10 years its been the exact same issue -- 4 seeds get shipped out west. Say instead of San Jose there was a pod in one of Atlanta, Charlotte, Orlando or Miami -. This problem could be easily solved by the NCAA.
3. As for Western teams playing out East, once again not a committee issue. I always tell people an easy exercise to do when you have this complaint, is take the s-curve, and:
a) Follow pod rules
b) Follow confernce rules. i) First three teams from each conference must be in a different region., ii) A conference cannot meet until elite 8 - so in every region the 1,4,5,8,9,12,13,16 teams must be from a different conference.
Its impossible to make the geography make sense for most teams.
It complicated things when the pod system was created. Without a pod system, Miami would be playing out West this week -- some of the other teams could get closer -- but why are we protecting higher seeds instead of teams that earned better bids?. To me the pod system makes total sense (fairness and seat wise) but just need to move a further location east.
We could get teams to play closer to home if you totally got rid of the conference bracket rules. So its an NCAA thing not a committee thing. Instead of not meeting until round of 8... change it to round of 16 or round of 32.
But remember how unhappy we were about Syracuse facing Marquette in the round of 32 back in 2011 (this was an issue caused by the conference having more than 8 teams). This is the choice that NCAA has to make - to significantly reduce travel or get rid of conference bracketing rules. I sort of like the current setup, of avoiding conference rematches until the elite 8.
You could also help geography if you decided to really mess with seed integrity (allow teams to move up or down 2 lines frequently). Committee allows it for one line. I don't really want two line moves either.
