by J.P. Giglio McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT) – The NCAA unveiled its 2008 men’s Tournament… by J.P. Giglio McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT) – The NCAA unveiled its 2008 men’s Tournament bracket, a diagram in which millions of fans will try to divine the path to the national championship.

But a change in how the bracket is arranged has made it easier to guess the winning route: Look at those with the shortest ones.

The distance that teams travel grew in importance six years ago when the Tournament selection committee began organizing its 65-team field into geographical groupings known as “pods.” The intent was to make it easier for fans to attend early round games. But the change had another effect. It has created “super seeds,” top teams that get the weakest early opponents, avoid grinding travel and play closer to their fans.

An analysis by the News ‘ Observer of Raleigh, N.C., of the past 12 years of Tournament data found that the distance a team travels for a game is a telling factor in the outcome. Teams that played within 100 miles won 77 percent of their games. At 250 miles, teams are winning 69 percent of their games. But the farther away, the worse it gets: Teams that traveled 500 miles or more won just 46.5 percent.

For top teams, the switch to pods shortened the road to the Final Four. No.1 and No. 2 seeds now travel less than half the distance they did before in the early rounds, often within a few hours’ drive of their campus. Lower seeds also travel less, but they still play, on average, more than 1,000 miles from home.

The 2008 bracket announced Sunday shows some striking examples of what happens when favorable seeds are bolstered by favorable locations. No. 1-ranked North Carolina will play its first two games in Raleigh and potentially the next two in Charlotte. The Tar Heels could earn a trip to the Final Four without ever leaving the Tar Heel state.

No. 1 seed in the West, UCLA, will play what are essentially home-court games for the first two rounds in Anaheim. The No. 1 seed in the South, Memphis, will start out just down the road in Little Rock, Ark.

“The No. 1 seeds get the best of everything, then the No. 2s,” said Citadel athletic director and former N.C. State coach Les Robinson, who worked on the NCAA Tournament selection committee from 1999 to 2004. “The No. 16s get the worst. It’s the fairest way to do it.”

But it was also part of the tournament’s fairness and a reason it was a stage for upsets that all games were played on neutral courts. The pod system is clouding that neutrality.

John Feinstein, whose 2006 book “Last Dance” chronicles the 2005 NCAA Tournament and the history of the Final Four, said giving top teams a chance to play closer to home can be unfair. He pointed to the fate that befell No. 8 seed Wisconsin in 2002 when the Badgers had to play No. 1 seed Maryland at the Verizon Center in Washington. Maryland won 87-57 before a screaming red crowd of Maryland faithful.

“It was insane,” Feinstein said. “They might as well have played that game at Maryland, because it was a home game.”

Maryland coach Gary Williams agreed it wasn’t fair, but he wasn’t going to complain. Williams said he would rather the NCAA stage its Tournament at true neutral sites.

“Before the pod system, you didn’t worry about it,” Williams said. “You were going to travel. I just liked it when they threw everybody out there and you just played.”

Greg Shaheen, the NCAA’s senior vice president for basketball and business operations, declined to be interviewed for this story.

National powers Duke and North Carolina have been the biggest beneficiaries of playing close to home. Since 2000, Duke has played eight NCAA Tournament games within 100 miles of Durham. UNC has played six within 100 miles of Chapel Hill in the past decade. None of the NCAA’s other 300-plus teams has played more than two so close to their campus.

For many teams, playing closer to home than their opponents helped fuel a long trip through the bracket.

Georgetown beat UNC last year and made the Final Four, playing all of its games as the “closest” team. George Mason, a surprising No. 11 seed, made the Final Four the year before – playing in a Washington arena 20 minutes from its Fairfax, Va., campus. Illinois traveled just 261 miles to win its way into the Final Four in 2005. Duke went only 400 miles in 2004 before it was in the Final Four.

Such examples are fewer in the years prior to the change, when teams routinely had traveled 1,100 miles or more before reaching the Final Four.

The analysis shows that the NCAA’s travel change coincides with less madness in March.

There have been fewer overall upsets since the change. But more telling is that there have been fewer upsets by teams that had traveled to the game a farther distance than their opponent.

The result is a changing complexion to the sport’s national championship tournament, which landed the NCAA a $6.1 billion television contract from CBS, in part for its unpredictable nature.

In the six years before the travel change, an average of 10 of the top 20 teams in the Tournament made it to the Sweet 16 each year, a coveted middle step of the Tournament that is a measuring stick for programs.

Since then, about 12 of the top 20 are making it each year.

That’s an average of two fewer Cinderella stories each year.

And consider this: There were 53 upsets in the first round from 1996 to 2001, the six years prior to the pod system. Since then, there were 41. The closest team has won more since the change, too – from a virtual coin-flip of 51 percent of the games up to now two-thirds of them now.

The system has largely been embraced by the sport’s coaches and administrators, even the ones burned by it or whose rivals have been helped by it.

“It’s not stacking the deck against someone else; it’s a reward for the regular season,” said N.C. State athletic director Lee Fowler, who was the chairman of the NCAA Tournament selection committee in 2002 and has served on the committee six times.

“It’s not a conspiracy by the NCAA or CBS. I can promise you that.”

The NCAA seeds the 65 teams in the Division I tournament, sets the schedule and location assignments and pays for each team’s travel.

The NCAA revamped its bracket process in 2002, adopting the “pod” system to keep teams closer to home. Instead of sending a group of eight teams from the same part of the first and second round bracket to one site, the NCAA breaks them up into groups of four. It’s called a pod.

For example, the No. 1 team plays the No. 16 seed in the first round. The winner advances to the second round to face the winner of the first-round game between the No. 8 and No. 9 seeds. Those four teams -1-16, 8-9 -are considered the pod.

Two groups of four are assigned to one of eight sub-regional sites, based on geography. So instead of eight teams from the East Regional, Raleigh might get a combination of four from the South and four from another region.

Being a No. 1 seed doesn’t guarantee the best location for the entire Tournament, though. Oklahoma was the No. 1 in the East Regional in 2003. The Sooners advanced to the regional final to play Syracuse, the No. 3 seed. But the game was in Albany, N.Y., and the Orange, whose campus is 145 miles away, won the game 63-47.

“Were we happy?” Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione asked. “Playing in Albany and in front of that sea of orange was tough, but we weren’t going to use it as an excuse.”

Despite the experience, Castiglione, whose team started the 2003 Tournament in Oklahoma City, called the pod system a good system.

“It’s achieving what it was intended to do,” Castiglione said. “I think it has been a very good approach and necessary one.”

Finding opponents of the system is almost as impossible as a No. 16 beating a No. 1 seed. Even ACC rivals agree with Castiglione. Virginia coach Dave Leitao said the state of North Carolina has so many qualified NCAA sites – Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Charlotte have all hosted NCAA games since 2002 – that it’s almost impossible to negate an advantage for UNC or Duke.

“Whether it’s fair or not is not the question,” Leitao said. “It just so happens that both in-state schools play at a high enough level to take advantage of it.”

George Mason coach Jim Larranaga, whose team plays in the Colonial Athletic Association, advanced to the 2005 Final Four as a No. 11 seed. The advantage of playing in Washington wasn’t intentionally set up for the Patriots, as it is for the better seeded teams early on.

“They didn’t do it to help us,” said Larranaga, whose team beat national powers Michigan State and UNC to get to the Washington regional. “I know that we had to earn our way.”

Larranaga called the benefit of playing closer to home a “tremendous advantage” for the top seeds, but he still wouldn’t change the pod system.

“It works better than the old system,” Larranaga said. “No matter where the games are played, you want to give the fans an opportunity to go to the games and the only way to do that is if it’s a reasonable distance.”