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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I give you the last four rounds of the Worst NCAA Pool Bracket Ever:
That's small and hard to read, but it's filled out with the winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school…
It was a regular hoopsapalooza yesterday in Chateau Steelypips, with Syracuse playing Villanova at 2:00, and Maryland playing NC State at 3:30, both games on tv. And, of course, there were a host of other games on, including UCLA getting waxed at Washington, THE Ohio State University narrowly…
The 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship officially started Tuesday, with the first of the "First Four" games, formerly known as the "play-in" game. It gets going in earnest today, though, which means that once this posts, I'll be shutting the Internet down and working like crazy for a few hours…
The NRC rankings are out.
Penn State Astronomy is ranked #3 - behind Princeton and Caltech.
W00t!
PSU doing the mostest with the leastest.
The Data Based Assessment of Graduate Programs by the National Research Council, for 2010, is out, reporting on the 2005 state of the program.
The full data…
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.