a teams current position in the poll does affect things. If a team like Ohio State starts the year ranked #40 and wins a lot of games against bad opponents and moves up to say #22, but then loses 4 out of 5 games, than where does that put them? probably back at #40. if they play well the rest of the season and move up 10 spots, than that puts them at #30. That's about a 7 seed. If the team starts #10 in the country and does the same thing, than the team ends up 20-25 after playing well and then losing 4 of 5. Move up 10 spots after playing well the rest of the season and end up 10-15 with a 3-4 seed. If you don't think ranking matters now, than i'm not sure you have followed college basketball or football over the years. What I am historically unsure of is how much poll ranking has affected seeding. To my knowledge it is almost identical in most cases, but I am definitely not sure of that. Example, top 8 teams get a 1 or 2 seed and usually the top 3-4 get a 1 seed, 9-16 get a 3 or 4 seed etc. How many times has there been more than a single seed difference over the last 5 years? example, a team ranked #20 in the polls gets a 3 seed or a team ranked #9 gets a 5 seed. The polls are significantly influenced by the ranking at the beginning of the season and perception of how good a team is. Based on that it would seam very reasonable that blind resume seeding in the tournament should not be close to perfectly correlated with the biased polls. From my knowledge it has been very closely correlated. Please prove me wrong because I want to be wrong on this one and get to ignore the polls.
