Random.org & NCAA No-Picks Tournament draw on my blog (sorry regulars)

For several years, I forget how many, I have either participated or have run a low-cost, no-pick NCAA tournament bracket including this year.

Sixteen people sign up and each player gets four teams randomly selected from the NCAA pool of 64 teams with a chance to win money. It makes things fun because after the draw you suddenly have four new teams to root for. To make things fair, each player gets a 1-4 seed, and one team each from the 5-8, 9-12 and 13-16 seeds.

The longest surviving seed in the three lower groups wins its owner a small amount of money and the overall tournament winner gets all the remaining cash. It adds some tension to games with teams that usually nobody would care about.

This year rather than doing the old school drawing with paper out of a hat, I went to Random.org to generate the field instead of paper. This is a very cool true random number generator (not the artificial random algorithms) built and operated by Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland. This sounds very impressive. Best of all and most importantly, it means Dungeons & Dragons needs no dice.

Anyway, here is the 2010 draw, forever preserved in the Webiverse in the order participants signed up. I will update whenever possible rather than flood mailboxes with e-mail.

Jody - Kansas, BYU, Sam Houston State, Northern Iowa

Larry - Pitt, Marquette, Sienna, Georgia Tech

Amy - Purdue, Oklahoma State, Morgan State, Florida

Jared - Baylor, Xavier, Vermont, Old Dominion

Layton - Maryland, Tennessee, Murray State, Sand Diego State

Mike - Duke, Michigan State, Houston, Saint Mary's

Randy - New Mexico, Clemson, UC Santa Barbara, Louisville

Dan - Vanderbilt, UNLV, Oakland, UTEP



Mark - Villanova, Notre Dame, Lehigh, Minnesota

Sarah - West Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Missouri

Cottle - Georgetown, Richmond, Robert Morris, Utah State (Cottle gets this team in this pool every time they make the field).

Dirk - Kentucky, Temple, Arkansas-PB, Washington

HiHo - Ohio State, Gonzaga, East Tennessee, New Mexico State

Heidi B. - Kansas State, Butler, Wofford, Cornell

Kent - Syracuse, California, North Texas, Wake Forrest

Emmie - Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Montana, Florida State