Bracketology (Article #1) March 31, 2008

I have collaborated with d3bracketology to form an estimate of what the NCAA brackets could look like. We also tried to throw in some twists of things we would like to potentially see. We will try to post a new issue of Bracketology at the beginning of every week after evaluating the past weekend's results. Enjoy and feel free to share your comments.

*Automatic Qualifiers - 25 teams. This is composed of all of the winners of conferences with automatic bids. We did our best to decide who may win the smaller conferences.
*Independents - 9 teams. This is composed of teams from conferences who don't have automatic bids as well as Independents.
*At-Large - 7 teams. This is composed of teams from conferences with automatic bids who don't win their conference such as the NESCAC or UAA.

*Our Independents were: Santa Cruz, TCNJ, Kalamazoo, UW-Whitewater, Vassar, Calvin, Wheaton, Skidmore, Carthage
*Our At-Larges were: Emory (UAA), Middlebury(NESCAC), Redlands(SCIAC), Amherst(NESCAC), DePauw(SCAC), Carnegie Mellon (UAA), Trinity(CT)(NESCAC)
*Teams who are just outside of the At-Large Top 7: Salisbury(Capital), Chicago(UAA), Bowdoin(NESCAC), Bates(NESCAC), Pomona-Pitzer(SCIAC), Hardin-Simmons(ASC)
*All other teams are Auto Bids

Our bracket:

Region 1: Santa Cruz*, CMS, Redlands, Whitman, UT-Tyler
Region 2: Kenyon*, Johns Hopkins, Calvin (MI), Baldwin-Wallace (OH), Transylvania (KY)
Region 3: Williams*, Trinity (CT), Skidmore, Baruch (NY), Southern Maine
Region 4: Washington, Carnegie Mellon, Kalamazoo*, Wheaton (IL), Westminster (MO)
Region 5: Trinity (TX) , W&L*, Christopher Newport, Stevens (NJ), Drew (NJ)
Region 6: Emory, Mary Washington*, TCNJ, Alvernia (PA), Messiah (PA)
Region 7: Gustavus, DePauw, Coe, UW-Whitewater, Grinnell* (IA), Carthage (WI)
Region 8: Middlebury*, Amherst, Vassar (NY), Salve Regina (RI), Ithaca (NY)

An asterisk denotes Host team. The seeds are in order in each region. The top team in each region gets a bye and plays the winner of 4 vs. 5. 2 and 3 both get byes and then play each other. In the final 8...Region 1 plays Region 8, 4 plays 5, 3 plays 6 and 2 plays 7. We specifically made the bracket so that each region is balanced difficulty wise (with the exception of the west). If you look at the current rankings of the top two seeds in each region they all add up to between 18 and 22, meaning each region is the same difficulty. We also had to take into account the 500 mile rule due to NCAA financial restrictions. A team can only go 500 miles away from home or they have to be flown. As few teams should be flown as possible. We will continue to update this bracket as results come in that could potentially change things.