Politics and what not

Here is my take.  First, I think it is useful to establish the importance of probability to this discussion.  It ABSOLUTELY does matter where we are placed and who we have to go through to get to the championship game.  The reason why is probability.  I will use power ratings as an illustration.  There are two broad categories of power ratings.  One is based on margin of victory and the other is based only on the final result, win or lose.  Each is flawed.  A pure win/loss system does not take into account probability.  Say two well matched teams played 10 games.  One might win 6 and the other 4.  The reasons are many.  Injury, illness, mental distress, key player is in a temporary slump, inconsistent player plays that rare awesome game and so on.  But that is why a lower rated team can win and it is the reason why we play the tournament instead of just crowning a champion based on power ratings.  Now, imagine if those two teams only play ONCE, any of those 10 scenarios could occur.  The lesser team has a 40% chance of winning that one game.  Maybe they win by a point.  The same is true of teams separated by a larger difference in ability.  The lower team may only have a 10% chance but they can still win because of probabilistic factors.  A weak team could, in theory, play only the top 30 teams in the country and get "lucky" every time.  They could also beat other mediocre teams or even weak teams by a point.  Either way, they will be rated incredibly high because a pure win/loss system does not account for statistical outliers.  An MOV system or "points" or "predictor" system is the opposite.  It doesn't care who won or lost but what the MOV was.  A team could crush a bunch of mediocre teams and barely lose to every good team they play and end up with a high rating, even though they can't pull out the win in important games.  So a good power rating combines them both.  But it is still flawed in that it will never be able to predict the outcome of every game because of those nasty probabilistic factors.  

Now, to the topic at hand, our path absolutely matters because it will affect the probability of falling victim to one of those factors.  The more teams you play that are good, and the better they are, the more likely it is that probability gremlins will bite you in the backside.

But, for me, the most important thing is transparency.  NOTHING points to UConn being anything other than the top 2 seed.  Any argument one could make about not winning important games or losing bad games are all addressed in the power ratings in an unbiased way that no argument between humans could possibly achieve because it accounts for ALL of the games played throughout D1.  The transitive property is applied a million times and it does this hundreds or thousands of times as the power ratings are adjusted to minimize the errors due to those probabilistic factors.  It does this using an optimization algorithm.  Even the NCAA's Net ranking does this.  The RPI was absolute crap and the NET is far better.  Either way, however, everyone knows what factors are used in the calculation and can build a schedule accordingly.  But when the NCAA says that they are going to take the 5th best team, as defined by their own system, and make them a 3 seed, they need to explain why.  If you don't know the rules of a game, how can you play?  THEY MUST BE TRANSPARENT about whatever factors they are using to justify this drop because it DOES affect the chances of winning it all for one of the teams that CAN win it all.  One factor they have used in the past is injury.  We have been demoted in the past for injury reasons when we lost a key player.  Why are they not promoting us when we have added multiple key players relative to when we were losing games? We need transparency!!!

You mentioned voting rights.  I wonder why UConnChapette didn't delete your post, or move it, for being political?  Now you know why I asked UConnChapette.  Could it be because political posts are ok if they align with your ideology or they support your side?  As for voting rights, rights were not changed.  Voting laws are not the same as voting rights.  They are meant to retain the integrity of the elections.  They aim to make sure that the person who wins is actually who the majority want to win.  If the voting system can not be fully and completely audited and/or monitored, you have lost transparency.  When you lose transparency, the integrity will be in doubt.  What happened in 2020 was a wild west scenario.  Whether the results were valid or not is not really the question.  Transparency and integrity are the question.  If the guy I vote for loses, so be it.  But I want to make sure there is complete transparency.  You can't have that if you allow mail in ballots to be mass mailed to everyone and then harvested by anyone.  You can't have that if you don't use voter ID or do signature matching.  If we think we can and should get everyone in the country vaccinated then we should be able to get everyone registered to vote, make them a universal ID and get them to the polls just like we got them to the vaccination sites and testing sites.  If someone really needs an absentee ballot they should be required to request it and their signature should be verifiable.  It is an insult to the group you claim to be protecting when you say that they are incapable of meeting these requirements.  One might even call it bigoted.  If your concern is a lack of voting sites, advocate for more.  Everyone can agree on that.  You will NEVER get everyone to agree that we should continue to mass mail ballots, allow them to be harvested by anyone and then not check signatures because, well, there are just too damn many of them.  Sorry, no...that is NOT a solution.  It does NOT provide transparency and it does NOT guarantee integrity.