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Attendance Swaps Highlight Tournament Bracket

Here's the bracket that you've probably already seen.

People always have a pretty good idea of what the NCAA tournament field will be prior to the brackets being announced, but there always seems to be a few tweaks in the match-ups that are difficult to predict.

This year, the bracket looked like it could be pretty straightforward. It was possible to create a perfect 1 vs. 16, 8 vs. 9, etc. bracket without any sort of intraconference match-ups in the first round. But the committee did throw a curveball into things by rearranging the number 3 seeds to get Michigan into the Fort Wayne regional to help increase attendance--and for the more cynical, to increase their odds of getting a local team to the Frozen Four.

Personally, I don't have a huge problem with shifting things around like that. With the tournament being a one-game playoff, and all these teams being so close in ability, who gets matched up with whom doesn't really matter a whole lot. The important thing is selecting who gets into the tournament, and after that, you're basically throwing those teams into a Yahtzee shaker and seeing who comes out. Every first round match-up is going to come down to which teams plays closest to their ability, and which teams get a couple breaks. The NCAA may as well make a few more dollars out of it as well.