Re: Bracketology
#12 seeds are almost exclusively at-large teams from "major" conferences. It would be highly unusual for an automatic-bid conference champion to sneak into a #12. The reason for this is sheer math.
Usually somewhere around 18 of the 31 conferences put only the tournament champion into the tournament's 68 slots. 68-18 is 50. 50/4 is 12.5, which means that multiple-bid conferences for the most part fill up all of the slots down to and including half of the 13-seed line. This also means to have any realistic chance of moving from the 13 to the 12, a team's RPI has to be at least 50 (for a major-conference team) and probably more like 20-30 for a mid-major conference, due to built-in biases such as scheduling realities for mid-majors along with things like name-recognition bias.
#12 seeds are almost exclusively at-large teams from "major" conferences. It would be highly unusual for an automatic-bid conference champion to sneak into a #12. The reason for this is sheer math.
Usually somewhere around 18 of the 31 conferences put only the tournament champion into the tournament's 68 slots. 68-18 is 50. 50/4 is 12.5, which means that multiple-bid conferences for the most part fill up all of the slots down to and including half of the 13-seed line. This also means to have any realistic chance of moving from the 13 to the 12, a team's RPI has to be at least 50 (for a major-conference team) and probably more like 20-30 for a mid-major conference, due to built-in biases such as scheduling realities for mid-majors along with things like name-recognition bias.
Comment