Hey smart guy...

Here's another set of facts, and actually potentially really useful. This is also from the Daily Spec site, and these were compiled by hedge fund trader Alston Mabry:

If the tournament were a coin-tossing exercises, there would indeed be 2^63 = nine quadrillion outcomes. But can we improve those odds?

Looking at the NCAA Tournament results for 2005 and 2006, 86 of 126 games were won by the higher-seeded team, a 68.3% win rate for the NCAA seeding committee. If the seeding were random, one would expect a win rate of 50% with a 4-5% standard deviation, so the committee's results are inconsistent with randomness.

If you go further and rank the games by the difference in seeding (low seed minus high seed, so that a one seed playing a 16 seed would be a 15-spread game), and then look at the quartiles, you see that the committee is even more successful. The first column is the average difference in seeding between the teams in the quartile, and the second column is the rate at which higher-seeded teams won in that quartile:

seed diff / win rate
12.29 87%
7.79 75%
4.25 69%
1.27 42%