Rough road for top seeds of march madness.

• Position: YOU LIFE

Bracket fanatics beware: specialists in statistical analysis have found the odds do not favor NCAA men's basketball teams seeded No. 1 in the big tournament--at least not taken as a group in recent years. Office pool aficionados should know that all four No. 1 seeds advance to the Final Four only once every 38 years, according to Sheldon Jacobson, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and researcher Alex Nikolaev of the University at Buffalo (N.Y.).

"If you compare the likelihood of exactly zero, one, two, three, or four No. 1 seeds reaching the Final Four, the rarest combinations are when all four of them get to that stage or when none of them advance," Nikolaev explains. Both events have occurred once, in 2008 and 2006, respectively; the results are based on analysis of the pattern of seeds that have reached the Sweet 16, Elite Eight, and Final Four between 1985 and 2010. The NCAA Tournament--although not this research--dates back to 1939.

The seed combinations with the better chances of reaching the Final Four are 1-1-2-3, 1-1-1-2, and 1-1-22, which should occur on average once every 15, 16, and 18 years, respectively, the analysis shows. The most common event is when two top seeds reach the Final...