As threatened in passing earlier, I went through the NCAA Tournament field, picking the games based on the ranking of Ph.D. programs in Physics (I set the "Scholarly quality of program faculty is high" weight to 5, and left everything else off). I entered it on Yahoo, which provides a spiffy PDF version for those who want to see the full bracket.
The Final Four ends up being Maryland, Texas, Illinois, and Stanford, which would've made some sense about five years ago, but isn't really all that likely this year...
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It could have been much worse if Penn hadn't met Stanford in the second round; if Penn had been in the Midwest regional, they would have made the Final Four.
I'm still shocked that Illinois qualified this year.
Aside from Illinois and Stanford it's not all that bad.
Could someone please explain the use of the word 'seed' in sports? When someone says 'so and so is the first seed' I have no idea what they are talking about...but apparently this is secret knowledge because whenever I call into sports shows to ask what they are talking about they just laugh and go on to the next caller...
Re: Seeding
Seeding occurs when you have an elimination tournament with rounds where teams (or competitors - I'll just say teams here) are eliminated. You want to make it relatively fair such that all the best teams don't play each other in the first round letting some team not as good get a "free pass" to the later rounds. So you rank the teams by how strong you think they are and then arrange (seed) the brackets such that the strongest don't meet until the finals. The NCAA does this to an extreme - ranking every team in the tournament between 1 and 16 ( number 1 seed being the strongest). With 64 teams that means 4 number 1 seeds, 4 two seeds, etc. It then sets 4 brackets each with a 1 to 16 seed in the bracket. In each bracket Number 1 seed plays number 16 seed, 2 seed plays 15 seed and so on. Thus the number one seeds would not play each other till the semifinals (The Final Four). A two seed won't play a one seed until the quarter finals, and so on. This hurts the low seeds - I don't think a 16 seed has ever beaten a 1 seed in the NCAA basketball tourney.
This is done in basketball, in college baseball, in Tennis, sometimes in chess or go I believe, but I think they use other tournament styles a lot in those games.