Originally Posted by
Green Wave Dukie
Agree with you on adjusting rankings to take into account special circumstances; lost point opportunities over the past year due to injuries, ability on the specific surface, etc. But even then, tennis, unlike most other sports I can think of, allows for the randomness of placing seeds in a draw. The #1 seed, for instance, has just a good of chance to play the #5 seed in the quarters as they do the #8. So, unless they made either Nadal or Alcaraz #2, they could still meet Djokovic (assuming they kept him at #1) in the semis, or earlier (case in point this year). I like the randomness of the way tennis does it, but I'm used to it. I could certainly see why it would bother others (note, Toooold, this is not directed at you).
Yeah it confused me at first, as I was used to the NCAA format where 1 always plays 8, 2 always plays 7, etc.
But since tennis rankings are a cumulative 52-weeks of points (unlike a committee assigning you a seed days before the tournament), they have to have some randomness to avoid seeding manipulation for match-up purposes leading into grand slams, where players might be deliberately losing or other weird stuff in the lead-up tournaments.
A text without a context is a pretext.