Talk:1978 NCAA Division I basketball tournament

message: First great job on doing the brackets to thoses working on that but I  have a question I noticed this on a few pages the number of games played vs  teams involoved . 
"involved 32 schools playing in single-elimination play to determine the national champion of men's NCAA Division I college basketball. It began on March 11, 1978, and ended with the championship game on March 27 in St. Louis, Missouri. A total of 32 games were played"
if 32 teams are playing in the tourny and it is single elimation it would be 31 games ( unless there was some 3rd place game played as well?) Smith03 01:03, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, there was a third place game. In some cases, there were 2-3 third place games (one national, 1-2 regional). If you look at the "Teams" section, you'll notice that one team finished third and another finished fourth. You can extrapolate the score of the third place game from that information. A future revision to the brackets will include third place games, but at this point, Template:4RoundBracket-Byes doesn't support them. User:Zzyzx11 and I are discussing this problem. --Dantheox 02:26, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

message: For decades the NCAA Tournament was a very regional thing, and regions often had varying numbers of teams in one year. In the late seventies though there was a move to make the regions more even, culminating with seeding being introduced after the 1976 tournament due to the unfairness of some of that tournament's first round matchups. In 1977, the committee declined to use the seeding power, but in 1978 they did use it. It was a very nascent and complex seeding style that only lasted for one year, and in 1979 the familiar seeding that we have today began. 
Almost no one ever mentions the 1978 seeding and I've never to this day seen a chart of it. The only proof I have of its existence are some contemporary newspaper articles I dug up on Lexis-Nexis. The articles are frustratingly vague in their descriptions of the system, and I've had to piece things together from what little the articles reveal. As best I can determine
Each region consists of two groups of teams seeded 1-4, the automatic qualifyers and the at-larges. Several smaller conferences with automatic bids had their winners designated "at large" for seeding purposes. The 16 conferences designated automatic qualifyers for the purposes of seeding were: Big Ten, Ohio Valley, Mid-American, SEC, Pacific-8, Big Sky, West Coast, WAC, ACC, Ivy League, Southern, Eastern 8, Big 8, Southwest, Missouri Valley, and Metro. 
The sixteen "automatic qualifyers" were seeded according to their conference's record in the last five tournaments. I am not sure how this shakes out for the Metro or Eastern 8, since they were relatively new, or if this record counts third place games or not. 
As for the sixteen "at larges," they were seeded according to their "competitive record." I'm not sure what "competitive record" is supposed to mean. It doesn't appear to be W-L PCT because the seedings don't make sense using that method. The only thing we know for a fact is that Marquette was the number 1 at large in its bracket, the rest is just conjecture. 
All this said, here is my best reconstruction of how the seeding went at 1978. Please note that I made dozens of conjectures and may be way off on a lot of them.
1AQ MI St
3AL Providence
4AQ Western KY
2AL Syracuse
3AQ Miami
1AL Marquette
2AQ Kentucky
4AL Florida St
1AQ UCLA
3AL Kansas
4AQ Weber St
2AL Arkansas
3AQ San Fran
1AL UNC
2AQ New Mexico
4AL Cal St Fullerton
1AQ Duke
3AL Rhode Island
4AQ Penn
2AL St. Bonaventure
3AQ Furman
1AL Indiana
2AQ Villanova
4AL La Salle
1AQ Missouri
3AL Utah
4AQ Houston
2AL Notre Dame
3AQ Creighton
1AL DePaul
2AQ Louisville
4AL St. John's
72.84.234.111 22:04, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  1978 Seeding