Just a few days ago the winner of the NCAA basketball tournament was determined in the final game played at Detroit. Leading up to this yearly championship game was a wild series of playoff encounters among 65 college and university teams from around the nation. And starting off this whole sequence were some badly misplaced basketball fives.

This entire process involved teams representing public and private institutions from four regions of the nation — East, South, Midwest and West. Supposedly representing each of these regions in the series of national playoff games are 16 teams. It’s at this point where some something gets badly distorted.

I have a strong hunch someone has an explanation for a team from Oregon ending up with teams supposedly representing the eastern part of the nation. As far as I’m concerned, this explanation defies any real logic.

Now, let me run through the list of those 65 teams representing those four regions to point out some of those misplaced teams.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a misplaced team from Oregon. On the East list is Portland State. One could quickly assume this particular team is from Maine. That’s wrong. Portland State University is on the west side of Oregon’s largest city.

The University of Wisconsin is east of here so maybe its place is in the East bracket. Then again, maybe the Midwest bracket might by more appropriate. I also question the placement of Minnesota, Duke, a team from Texas, Florida State and UCLA from California in this part of the lineup.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned Duke University from North Carolina being erroneously listed in the east bracket. This team should be in the South part of the playoffs, period.

There are other teams that don’t belong in the NCAA’s South lineup at all. They are Butler University of Indiana, Gonzaga, which is still in Spokane, Wash., Akron of Ohio, Arizona State and Michigan.

On my copy of the NCAA tournament list, two teams were listed on the same line. Evidently Alabama and Morehead State hadn’t played their game to decide which one could advance to the second round. For both teams being in the Midwest category was being out if place. By the way, that’s Morehead State University of Kentucky, and not one of the two colleges up in Moorhead.

Other misplaced teams on the Midwest listing were Siena of New York, Arizona University, Wake Forest of North Carolina, West Virginia, Boston College, and University of Southern California. I’m not too sure about Robert Morris, which is a university in Pennsylvania and the name of a college in the Chicago area.

The West part of the lineup for the NCAA tournament contains even more misplaced teams. They are: Connecticut, Chattanooga, Purdue of Indiana, Northern Iowa of Cedar Falls, Mississippi, Marquette of Wisconsin, Missouri, Maryland and Memphis. There’s also Cornell: either the college in Mount Vernon, Iowa, or the big time university out in New York.

There’s another aspect of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament out of kilter. That’s with the localities where the second-round games were played last month.

For the East category the misplaced locality was Boise, Idaho. Down South, four of the teams had their playoff games in Portland, Ore. Here in the Midwest the lost locality was Miami, Fla. And out West the oddball locality was Philadelphia, Pa.

I got the impression the NCAA folks couldn’t quite decide where Dayton, Ohio, should fit into the playoff site lineup. Thus, this city ended up on both the Midwest and East parts of the scheduling. Another place involved in this mix-up was Kansas City, Mo., which was on both the West and South part of the lineup for second round games.

In conclusion,. I have just one more comment. All 65 of those lucky teams sure traveled around as part of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament.

Ed Shannon’s column has been appearing in the Tribune every Friday since December 1984.