The C.I.T. is Killing Me

I run a web site that does a lot with college basketball, including having brackets for the conference tournaments and the post season tournaments. There are a lot of different conference tournament brackets (12 teams, 11 teams, 10 teams, brackets where teams get byes into the semi-finals, the 16 team Big East bracket with 2 types of byes, and so on). There's also different post season (NCAA regional, NIT, and so on).

Last year there was a new post season tournament added. It's called the College Insider Tournament (C.I.T.). The setup was a 16-team tournament where teams were re-seeded after every round. That allowed for geographical efficiencies with the scheduling (so a team wouldn't have to go cross-country unless there was no other option). That was a brand new type of bracket (16 team with no real bracket until after a round was over). So I had to code a whole new type of tournament for that last year.

This year, the C.I.T. changed again. Now it is a 24 team tournament. Every team plays in the first round, which leaves 12 winners. From those 12 winners, 4 get byes into the third round and the other 8 play second round games. Of course, the teams that get the byes aren't known until the first round is over. All that work I did for last year's C.I.T. had to be re-done to make this year's C.I.T. work correctly. What a pain!

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