Analysing the reseeded gentlemen's bracket

The New York Times tennis blog Straight Sets has a little rundown of how the men's Wimbledon bracket was restructured after Rafael Nadal had to pull out of the tournament last week, vacating the #1 seed.

The explanation makes two things pretty clear:

1) The players are seeded as though the bracket is comprised of four sub-brackets much like the NCAA tournament.

2) There are (at least) four meaningful strata of players in the eyes of the seeding folks: the best four, the next 12, the next 16, and everyone else.

If you translate this to college basketball, that would be like lumping the 2 through 4 seeds together and then lumping the 5 through 8 seeds together. I guess my thought is this: If something similar ever had to be done for the NCAA Tournament (e.g. major violations by one of the teams surface the day before the tournament starts), who would benefit more--the 5 who jumps to the 2 line or the 9 that becomes a 5? My asnwer would be the first, but what do you all think?

And if we have any real tennis fans out there, who benefited / got hosed most by Nadal pulling out?