So the tournament brackets were posted for my son’s football league.
There seems to be some great force working against us. I mentioned before that the tournament isn’t seeded. Brackets are filled at random in the name of fairness. Sure, the cream will rise at any rate, but there’s some good teams getting bumped very early on…and I think the dynamic changes as the tournament plays out. There’s a difference between two undefeated teams meeting in round 1 and those same teams meeting 3 weeks in and fighting for a spot in the finals. It feels stupid to have an undefeated team eliminated in the first round, while a 4-4 team has a legitimate run to the semi finals because of the random seeding.
At any rate…
We got stuck in what is easily the most difficult bracket. Our group of 8 teams fighting for a spot in the final-four includes 6 of the top 10 teams. That means the other three brackets contain the other four…and its not evenly spaced either. One bracket has 3, another has 1 and the last bracket doesn’t have a single top-10 team in it. The highest ranked team in that bracket is 4-4. The best they can do is put a .500 team in the final four. Meanwhile, 5 of the top-10 teams will have been elminated in our bracket by then. That just seems wrong, the kids who do well during the season should get to play longer at the end. Plus, if you divide it into half and not quarters, our half of the touney has 9 of the top-10 teams and the other side has 1. Hell, the other half only has three teams (of 20) with winning records. I dunno. If you know anything about bracketing a tournament, this is about as opposite of correct as you can get.
With that said we go up against a 6-2 team at home that compares favorably to us. It’s not a gimme by any means, but we can do it if the boys play remotely well. The were beat handily by a couple of top-10 teams, but finished the season by crushing a third one.
If we win that, we face the winner of a match-up that puts an undefeated team against a winless one. That undefeated team? The team that dealt us our only loss this season. Still that was close and if we can learn from what we did wrong there, we could pull it out.
At that point it looks like our Round 3 opponent would probably be another undefeated team…either the #1 ranked team (which is the team we ended last season against with a typical close loss that came down to extra points) or the team that always seems to have our number and dealt us a loss last season and knocked us out of the tournament last year in that heartbreaker to end the season. The third team on that side of our brack only had one loss and they tied the team that beat us this year, so they definitely have a shot at making round three as well.
The point is that if we get past this team in round one and then extract revenge in round two, then the very next day, we will play one of the above teams in round 3. So just to get to the final four, we have to beat three of the top-10 teams. We we #7 this year and we’ll have to beat #10 (who we never faced) in round 1, #6 (who beat us by one point) in round 2, and then either #8 (who tied the team who beat us), #5 (who has a history of beating us) or #1 (who has bested us in the past) in round 3.
Now you see why the random seeding is fucked up. And not just for us. All the teams in our bracket face the same road.
At that point the semi-final game most likely comes down to either the #3 or #4 team. They face each other in round one (stupid random seeding again), but are far and away the strongest teams in their bracket. (#9 is in there was well, so they could squeak through)
Which is crap because there is a team (based on the random seeding that took place) that will get to the semi-finals without a winning record and never having faced a team ranked higher than #17 or #18.
So let me spell it out again. We are the #7 team. To reach the championship we will have to win against:
1. The #10 team
2. The #6 team
3. Either the #8, #5 or #1 team.
4. Either the #9, #4 or #3 team
So what’s left at that point?
The only top-10 team not on our half of the bracket…#2.
The highest ranked team that #2 will possibly see one their 4-round road to the championship game is #12…and that wouldn’t even be until round 3. If our road to the finals looks like my list above. In other other bracket, #2′s road (and how can #2 not be the favorite) looks like this:
1. The #27 team
2. Either #29 or #30
3. Most likely #12 or #13
4. Toughest scenario possible puts then agains either #17 or #18
So if things play out as one would suspect, #2 has an easy road to the finals and if we made it through our hellish bracket we’d face them in the finals.
Our best reasonable-case scenario looks like this:
1. #10
2. #6
3. #8
4. #9
5. #2
Our worst case scenario looks more like this:
1. #10
2. #6
3. #1
4. #3
5. #2
We’ll see. I like to think we can hold our own…and we have. Maybe a little luck will fall our way over the course of these games and we’ll slip through and knock out some upsets.