You know, I know nothing about sports (except for the small bits that I've gleaned from my roommate's obsession with football and a general obsession of my own with games and game design) and I care even less, but what I'm interested in is math and matching systems. Which is effectively what we have here, except in the case of a matching system you're looking to find the match ups which are the most uncertain and thus produce the most memorable games for the players and not trying to discover the most likely winner. Still, you're looking for a series of exchanges which allow you to decide an abstract spatial difference between two players.

It occurs to me, and I'm sure that this is not a new idea, that there's nothing about these algorithms that say they have to be run on current data. Knowing the general impulses of sports fans, I'm betting that the last few decades of scores from pretty much everything you ever might want to try and predict brackets for our stored online somewhere, along with a pile of other metadata and other potential informative signifiers. It would be interesting to see the results of the algorithms run on historical data to see if they can predict how things actually turned out compared to the ground truth. It's probably not terribly interesting for people who have been immersed in algorithmic bracket creation for a while, but as someone from outside the field, it would be interesting. I would compare the predictive potential of different historical eras in whatever sport in question is in play; for example, is predicting the bracket of football teams in the 70s significantly different in algorithmic result than feeding the data from the 80s in? As a random example more than anything.