Nate Silver, who does the NY Times blog fivethirtyeight (usually on elections, but now on more), did an analysis and reports that the elimination bracket style used by the NCAA (and debate tournaments) isn't exactly fair:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/when-15th-is-better-than-8th-the-math-shows-the-bracket-is-backward/
Specifically, it makes me wonder why we don't go to the style used by the NHL: amongst whichever teams are left, top seed plays bottom seed, second seed plays second worst, etc. In the NCAA, fixed brackets style, if the bottom seed upsets the top seed, suddenly the bottom seed now has an easier schedule than it deserves. In the NHL, re-seeding style, the bottom seed would have to keep upsetting all the top seeds to keep going.
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