Only one team (Kansas in 2008) West of the Mississippi has won it all in the last 22 seasons.

I've had this theory that jet lag from traveling across more than one time zone can have an impact on NCAA tournament games. Jet lag seems to affect travelers going west to east more than east to west because they lose hours instead of gaining them. So teams from the Mountain and Pacific zones would be affected if they have to play in the Eastern zone. And I've heard that jet lag is worse the day after, instead of the day of, traveling. So western teams coming to an eastern venue might need a day or two to acclimate. But this year, all the teams but UVA were in Indy at least seven days before their first games, so they would have had time to acclimate to the time zone change.

Like I said, this is just a theory and I haven't done any research on this. But in the past whenever a West Coast team played in the Eastern or Central zones, I pick the other team and am usually right.

Most of Indiana is, but some of it is Central I believe. Indianapolis used to be Central.

Map time!

https://www.timetemperature.com/tzus/united-states-time-z...

And some of us who go way back can remember when Ohio didn't switch to DST. When I was in the 5th grade my teacher complained that he missed the Kentucky Derby telecast because he thought the advertised starting time was Ohio time when in fact it was DST, so he was an hour late turning it on. DST didn't start in Ohio until 1970.

Getting back to the original question, this year there are considerably fewer teams from east of the Mississippi than there have been in most previous years. This year, only 38 teams come from east of the Mississippi. In 2018 and 2019 there were 44, there were 47 in 2017, 41 in 2016 and 40 in 2015. Part of it is because some of the usual suspects weren't in the tourney this year, like Duke, UK, Cincy, Xavier and Butler. The Ivy didn't play. The state of Indiana had only one team, instead of the usual two or three. And some of the conferences that straddle the continent had reps only from the west. The American had only two teams (Houston and Wichita St) and CUSA had only North Texas. So at least this year the western US has become more competitive. And it's likely that the logistics have helped even things up. The area west of the Mississippi is almost twice as big as the area east, so the teams likely have more travel during normal years. This year, once they settled into Indy, teams didn't have to travel more than 70 miles, and most traveled just a few miles.

The reason that the play-in game cam into existence is that the power conferences were worried about all the schools moving to D1 in the late 80's and 1990s, starting new conferences, and taking away at-large bids with new auto bids. So a deal was cut that capped the auto bids to 30. The 31st conference didn't come into being until the WAC split off the MWC because conferences kept growing from the 8-10 schools that most had been around 1990. The NCAA followed through and created the play-in game. When a 32nd conference got an auto bid the NCAA created a second play-in game and play-ins for the last at-large spots while they were at it. Reading this thread reminded me that were were missing the Ivy's auto bid this year and the rules as I understood them thus would have called for only a single 16/16 play-in game.