Two teams from the same state playing each other in the first round is not that big a deal - this year there are three. But Virginia and Old Dominion are about three hours apart. Texas Tech and Texas Arlington are more than five hours away from each other. We're freaking less than twenty minutes up the road from Santa Clara. I actually figured out the distance between all the first round match-up schools and the only other pairing that is separated by less than 100 miles is Tennessee and Western Carolina (just barely, at 95 miles, and they're in different states).
In the entire field of 64 teams, there is only one possible match-up that would pit schools, geographically closer than Santa Clara and Stanford, against each other. That would be Duke and North Carolina, which are separated by 10.4 miles (at least according to maps.yahoo.com - which is where all of my distance information is coming from - so take it with a grain of salt). Imagine the uproar if one of those two teams was guaranteed not to advance to the second round. In this year's tournament, those two teams will not meet until the final four.
Just for the sake of completeness, I looked at the two other possible match-ups of geographically close schools. For reference, Stanford and Santa Clara are 15.0 miles apart. Extremely close, which is not surprising because they're in the same city, are Houston and Rice Universities. These schools are separated by 15.2 miles. This year they will not meet until the sweet 16. Texas Arlington and TCU are 20.3 miles apart. But no need to worry since the earliest they could meet this year would be in the championship game. All other schools were greater than or equal to 30 miles from any potential opponent.
Now I have no idea if the committee keeps track of how close schools are to each other when they make the pairings. I just find it odd that Stanford and Santa Clara are such huge outliers (the mean for first round opponent schools is 930 miles and the median is 880 miles). In thinking that they have sinister motives when it comes to west coast schools, I'm probably giving them too much credit to expect something as trivial as distance to play any kind of role.
As a side note, I'm probably the only person who is irritated by the whole geographic thing. I gave a brief synopsis of my findings to S. earlier and she just stared at me. I think she was trying hard to see what my point was, but I just wasn't articulating it well enough (or it was so trivial as to be unimportant). Finally, she suggested that the discussion would make more sense if she could see a visual mapping of all the schools in this year's tournament.
I'm never one to turn down a request for multi-modal communication of a particular concept.
Click on thumbnail for larger image. Blue=Chattanooga regional. Purple=Philadelphia regional. Yellow=Tempe regional. Red=Kansas City regional.
