Seeding DOES Matter: In the Short-run

I've referenced this article by KenPom on why seeding doesn't matter multiple times in some recent posts.

About a month ago, before the field was set, the UNC Band Truck tweeted this:

@kenpomeroy while seeding doesn't really affect a team's chances of winning it all, it does affect each round's prob% so shouldn't we care?
— UNC Band Truck (@potacctruck) February 27, 2014

It's true, seeding doesn't really affect a team's overall odds of winning it all. But as the tweet indicates, it does affect a team's chances of getting to the next round in the short-run, and subsequently, their chances of getting to the next weekend. From my (albeit biased) perspective, this has major implications: seeding could be the difference between whether I (and the rest of the band, team, and cheerleaders) get to travel to both San Antonio, TX and New York City, or just the first/second round site.


North Carolina received a 6-seed in this year's tournament, while some pundits/talking heads/fans expected us to receive as high as a 4-seed. (I personally think the 6-seed was fair. We were 22nd in KenPom's ratings going into the tournament, predicted to be a 6 per the Bracket Matrix, and quite frankly, getting dropped to the 6 instead of the 5 was beneficial: we had to play Iowa St in the second round as opposed to Michigan St, AND the 12-seed of Harvard would've been a tougher draw than 11-seeded Providence). So let's assume we could've gone anywhere between a 4 and a 7.

I calculated North Carolina's odds of advancing from each seed, going up against the "average" opposing seed in the first two rounds:

Seed	7-seed	6-seed	5-seed	4-seed
Prob Round 32	58.71%	55.20%	60.96%	68.51%
Prob Sweet 16	26.78%	28.02%	27.18%	38.05%

These probabilities ascend with the seed, with the exceptions of the 6-seed in the first round and the 5-seed in the second. This is due to the relative strengths of the possible opposing 11-seeds (Tennessee, Iowa) and then the possible opposing 4-seeds (Michigan St, Louisville) in this year's tournament. So once again, matchups trump seeding: but being a higher seed generally does have a positive impact on your chances of making it to the second weekend.