Seeded Teams

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, good morning. My name is Lucy and I’m calling from San Clemente, California.

Hiya, Lucy.

What’s up? How can we help?

Well, with all of the sports things that have been going on lately, I am not much of a sports buff, but my husband is.

He’s an equal opportunity sports listener.

And so it’s always on in the background.

And over the years, I’ve heard them speak about different seeds, that this team or this person is seated here or there, first, fourth, whatever, in their ranking.

And over the years, I just thought that the announcer had bad diction and they were actually seeing seat, like they were seated first or fifth.

And during March Madness, I actually listened and I asked my husband, I said, are they actually saying seed, like the thing that grows from the ground?

And he said, yes, but he had no idea why.

And we couldn’t figure out where that came from or why they would call it a seed.

So we figured we’d ask you.

Okay.

So S-E-E-D is the word that you’re hearing, right?

Seed, as in like the seed of a plant.

And I was like you. I thought it was S-E-A-T for a long time.

Seat made a little more sense. Like you were, you know, it’s kind of like an orchestra, like your first chair, top talent at the front and so forth all the way back.

But there’s two different stories for this.

The one that I like best is that if you look at the tree for a tournament, as you winnow it down to the best team of each round, like two teams play, the winner goes on to the next round.

It starts to take the shape of a tree turned sideways.

And that even though the seed is at the top of the tree and the branches, and it all builds toward the root, it still looks like a tree.

And supposedly that’s the story.

But the other one that I’d heard was, and I don’t give much credence to this, is that you spaced them out evenly just like you would seeds so that you could see who would prosper the most.

That was my sense of it.

I spent a fair amount of time in the tennis world, and they would talk about seeding the tournament.

And you don’t want all the good players in one bracket because they’ll just cancel each other out.

You want people to buy tickets, so you seed them throughout.

So it’s a conscious act.

They don’t do seeding randomly.

That actually makes more sense to me.

Yeah, it does to me too.

But the thing is, there’s evidence early on is that it might have something to do with the visual structure of the tournament tree.

So there’s always a difficulty there.

Do I have something written in print that shows that?

But I do like that explanation because who wants a boring tournament?

Well, exactly.

You want to sell those darn tickets.

You want to fill those seats.

You can’t have your number one and your number two players play each other in the first round.

Exactly.

Because then you’re losing the excitement that’s going to come later in the tournament.

Right.

You don’t want Nadal and Djokovic in the first round.

Absolutely not.

I sure appreciate hearing those explanations.

Thanks, Lucy.

It makes a whole lot of sense now.

Sure thing.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Say hi to that sports fan in the house.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

Thanks.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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