Red Advantage ?

[Warren Boudreau]

I would recommend removing all elimination round matches from your data.

It is statistically biased such that the higher seeded teams are on the red side of the field. Yes, that is the way the brackets are supposed to work. There may be some exceptions, but there is still a statistical bias.

The qualifying round pairings and color assignments are pretty random, so that is where you are going to determine if there is a real statistical bias towards one color or the other.

So far, the only hard data that I have seen in this thread from the qualifying rounds indicates that blue might have an advantage over red. But the population pool is too small at this time to draw a valid conclusion.