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?

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Random thoughts while eating my Garden of Life Super Seed Whole Food Energy Bar!!!

Since we've all been too busy/lazy/indifferent to post much lately (though I don't think anyone else has noticed anyway), I figured I'd refresh the page by ripping off Pat's signature recurring post by tossing out a bunch of lazy one-liners about recent happenings in sports. Here goes...

Word today is that the Mariners fired hitting coach Jeff Pentland, who will be temporarily replaced by former Cubs manager Lee Elia. Wow--between manager John McLaren and Elia, I expect more unnecessary profanity in the Mariners' clubhouse than in Dennis Leary's standup act.

If we don't see better starts out of Joba Chamberlain soon, we may see Brian Cashman lose his joba.

Federer lost to Nadal again in the French Open. That Nadal is one fine-looking tennis player. And I do mean fine-looking.

Think Rafael Nadal bears any relation to former Marlins catcher Bob Natal?

Now that Dominik Hasek is retiring, he should have a lot more time to spend with his beautiful family and also, this guy.

Did you see Big Brown fall apart at the Belmont? Man, I haven't seen a horse choke that bad since that episode of Mr. Ed where he bites off Wilbur's arm.

That was some NBA Finals game last night, with L.A. nearly erasing a 20-point fourth quarter deficit. Man, I haven't seen Celtics choke like that since the Roman army won the Battle of Mons Graupius in 84 A.D.

More overdramatic: Paul Pierce on Thursday night or Cher in Moonstruck? Discuss.


...And I'm out!

(P.S.: I'll be going out of town tomorrow, so don't expect any new posts out of me until at least next Monday. Which is to say, don't expect any new posts out of this site until at least next Monday.)

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