Weakest Bracket or Duke Curse?

[Highlander]

I know this means nothing, but I am always curious where the weakest part of the bracket ends up being once the tournament is complete. My definition of the weakest bracket is that it is where each game winner immediately loses their next game. Working our way back from the championship game, consider the following....

Memphis loses to Kansas
UCLA loses to Memphis
Xavier loses to UCLA
WVU loses to Xavier
Duke loses to WVU
Belmont loses to Duke

Based on that, we were part of the weakest overall bracket in this year's tourney. Then again, maybe this is just an expanded version of the Duke curse. Beat Duke (or the team that beat us), and consider your season over...

[SoCalDukeFan]

In my opinion the West was by far the weakest. Which meant that UCLA had the easiest road of the number 1 seeds to get to the FF.

The fact that the UCLA AD was on "The Committee" probably had something to do with it.

SoCal

[brevity]

I know this means nothing, but I am always curious where the weakest part of the bracket ends up being once the tournament is complete. My definition of the weakest bracket is that it is where each game winner immediately loses their next game. Working our way back from the championship game, consider the following....

Memphis loses to Kansas
UCLA loses to Memphis
Xavier loses to UCLA
WVU loses to Xavier
Duke loses to WVU
Belmont loses to Duke

Based on that, we were part of the weakest overall bracket in this year's tourney. Then again, maybe this is just an expanded version of the Duke curse. Beat Duke (or the team that beat us), and consider your season over...

I do the same thing, only to determine the one team had the furthest degree of separation from the champion. For example, Villanova can at least say, "Well, we lost to the eventual champion," but Michigan State can't -- they lost to Memphis, who lost to Kansas.

This year Belmont is six degrees of separation from the champion, which means they can make the dubious claim that they lost to the team (Duke) that lost to the team (West Virginia) that lost to the team (Xavier) that lost to the team (UCLA) that lost to the team (Memphis) that lost to the champion (Kansas).

By this measure Duke is one of the 6 teams that are 5 degrees of separation from Kansas. (The others are Arizona, Baylor, Connecticut, Kentucky, and South Alabama.). Not that anyone would bother to map out all 64 teams this way -- I'm disregarding the play-in game -- but 15 teams have 4 degrees of separation, 20 have 3 degrees, 15 teams have 2 degrees, 6 teams have 1 degree (the ones Kansas beat), and Kansas, of course, has zero degrees.

It follows the seventh line of Pascal's triangle: 1/6/15/20/15/6/1.