I am not saying the weakish west doesn't deserve a regional site, but so does the very strong Atlantic coast and the very strong South. In a year when they were going to place not two but three regionals in the central section of the country to then give the weakish west the only non-central regional seems a bit silly. Ideally you would like to see a regional within 300 miles of say Philadelphia, 300 miles of Atlanta, 500 miles of Lincoln, and 500 miles of San Fran or Los Angeles.
Maybe "distance" should be measured travel time. Maybe "distance" should be measured using intervals of time or miles rather than points. Maybe two or more destinations where flight times or miles are within say, I don't know, +/-10% of each other should be considered the same "distance" and match ups should be determined by the S-curve.
As you know, there are some "if possibles" as well as some absolute rules. I sometimes misremember which is which.
When employing a ranking measurement, movement isn't strictly a function of one team. If Louisville moved from 6th to 7th, another team had to move to 6th. Perhaps it was the performance of the other team that affected the rearrangement more than anything Louisville did.
Which I read not two minutes after I posted. I swear! You are indeed a wise man.
It has never been that difficult to arrange to separate 8 teams into four regionals and make sure the teams are on different sides of the regional draws - By the time you get past the first 4 or 5 teams you are getting pretty low in the seeding and no one really questions dropping/raising a 6 seed one level or shipping them across the country to avoid it.
