@bmensch1 Yeah, let’s examine both of these. Tank to become a 9 gives you a first round against the 8. Then the 1 in the second round, so you can possibly get an easier third round matchup? That one makes no sense. A team at a 6 or 7 should not want to move down because they are both in the lower half of the bracket already.
Now, if you are the 8/9 going in, possibly moving to the 10 helps you, not in the third round, but in the second. You can get the 2 in the second round as the 10 rather than the 1 you would face as an 8/9. After that, the 3, if brackets hold, then the 1 in the reg final. So you avoid the 1 until 4 rounds in.
The problems with tanking to plan your seeding include (1) the committee is not that predictable far enough in advance for you to manipulate where you are placed; (2) it is impossible to anticipate how 33 conference tournaments will come out, and power conference mid-tier teams routinely get placed in those middle bracket positions, but upsets can jumble the mix; and (3) there is no way to know if that top half of the field team you just begged to face in the first round is actually pretty strong – it might be underseeded, too, and you could now be the underdog (maybe playing far from home) because you gave up a chance to be a favorite.
Most importantly, the tourney is single elimination so if you guessed wrong you are immediately screwed. In a double elim tournament, strong contestants who get “upset” in their first round have been accused of throwing that game so they can play in the loser bracket against theoretically weaker opponents. (I recall this in tennis and some other sport–a women’s sport?–where it was a big scandal.)
Finally, it is just hard to turn winning or losing on and off. A team projected at 8/9 trying to protect its chances of getting to the second weekend would do better to try like hell to win enough to become a 6 or 7 rather than trying to get down far enough to be the opponent of those seeds.
A better question in my mind is whether there is more predictable seeding at the top lines offered by the committees projected 1 thru 4 seeds. If you are likely a 2 or 3 it would behoove you to play hard to avoid falling to a 4. But is there a chance that the last 4 might want to fall to a 6? I still think that is all too hard for any team to predict, and too hard to turn around when you need to.
All in all, losing on purpose is literally a loser strategy.
