First round of the tourney relatively predictable:

The first round of the 2011 dance was only 35 positions away from perfect high seed dominance. That works out to a 13.7% reading on the Madometer. Unless this round gets crazy, we're looking at a pretty tame tourney. Usually, the Madometer reading goes down as we go deeper into the dance.

So how do we explain all this chalkiness when the Pythag numbers suggested that we had the weakest top 10 teams in the last eight years? The bigger issue is the overall weakness of the entire tourney field. I wrote a blog about this on Tuesday, and it's worth revisiting here:



At every seed position except four and 12, this year's tourney field has weaker efficiency than its historical counterparts. But here's the thing: the comparative weakness of the one through three seeds isn't nearly as dramatic as it is for the five through nine seeds. You can also see the sagging quality of the middle seeds in the curve comparison of this year's top 50 Pythag teams with the seven previous dances.

Bottom line: the top three seeds might be weaker than usual, but the rest of the seeds are even weaker than their counterparts. So they may not offer as strong a competition for the high seeds. Ergo: chalk. ... more » « less

First round of the tourney relatively predictable: The first round of the 2011 dance was only 35 positions away from perfect high seed dominance. That works out to a 13.7% reading on the Madometer. Unless this round gets crazy, we're looking at a pretty tame tourney. Usually, the Madometer reading goes down as we go deeper into the dance. So how do we explain all this chalkiness when the Pythag numbers suggested that we had the weakest top 10 teams in the last eight years? The bigger issue is the overall weakness of the entire tourney field. I wrote a blog about this on Tuesday, and it's worth revisiting here: <IMG SRC=/ blog/ 11_ pythcomp.gif> At every seed position except four and 12, this year's tourney field has weaker efficiency than its historical counterparts. But here's the thing: the comparative weakness of the one through three seeds isn't nearly as dramatic as it is for the five through nine seeds. You can also see the sagging quality of the middle seeds in the curve comparison of this year's top 50 Pythag teams with the seven previous dances. Bottom line: the top three seeds might be weaker than usual, but the rest of the seeds are even weaker than their counterparts. So they may not offer as strong a competition for the high seeds. Ergo: chalk.