ncaa mens basketball tournament the 64 teams that play in the elimination rounds are divided into...

NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

The 64 teams that play in the elimination rounds are divided into four groups of 16 teams. The four groups represent the West, East, Midwest, and South.


Within each group of 16 teams, each team is given a ranking. The #1 seed is considered the best team in that group of 16.


In the first round of play, the #1 seed plays the #16 seed, the #2 seed plays #15, and so on. A shortcut for remembering which teams play is to note that the sum of the seed numbers equals 17.


For each group of 16 the brackets for the first and second rounds are organized like this. The winners of the first round play in the second round based on this arrangement of brackets.


This table is a summary of the number of wins in the first round for games played from 2001 to 2011. Source: http://www.allbrackets.com.

http://www.allbrackets.com/


This graph shows a summary of the first round results based on the data table. Note how the top seeds show the most success. This isn’t surprising since the highest seed plays the lowest seed.


After the second round of play, the winners go on to play the Regional Semifinals, as shown in the brackets.


This table is a summary of the number of wins to advance to the Regional Semifinals for games played from 2001 to 2011. Once again, note how the top seeds dominate.


This is a graph of the data from the previous data table.


The succeeding brackets include the Regional Finals, the Final 4, and the Championship game.


This table shows the succeeding rounds leading up to the Championship game. With each succeeding round, the number of seeds drop, until the Championship winner comes exclusively from the top three seeds.


As you can see, the #1 seed dominates in terms of championship wins. And the top three seeds make up all the champions from 2000–2011.


• For the 2012 tournament, can we say, based on previous statistics, that the champion will likely come from one of the top 3 seeds?

• What is your prediction?