The 2021 NCAA Tournament has given us a historic Sweet 16, with four double-digit seeds making it to the second weekend and helping solidify the highest seed total (and seed average) since the field expanded. One of the great joys of the NCAA Tournament is the way the bracket can flipped on its head in a particular region when a top seed falls, opening up the path for the Cinderella runs that we celebrate every March.
These kinds of runs might not be as possible if the entire field was re-seeded, which is one of the reasons why personally I love the quirks of the bracket process as it stands. But what if the NCAA Tournament followed in the footsteps of other sports, tournaments and leagues with a re-seeding process to set up a more balanced bracket for the second weekend? We’ve taken a stab at that exact process below, providing both a glimpse of what the Sweet 16 might look like and also a power rankings of sort as we prepare for the weekend action.
The process for the seeding was not identical to the NCAA Tournament selection committee, because we’re not only taking into consideration what we’ve seen in the tournament so far but giving it more weight than any two (or three, in UCLA’s case) game sample from the regular season. Still, the profile and regular season results matter and contribute to a reset order among the teams still alive in the hunt for a national championship.