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According to Past Chairman of the American Statistical Association (ASA), Andrew Swift, there is simply a problem with the software used to randomly generate the seeding.
Here's a portion of the article on this subject:
Past Chairman of the American Statistical Association (ASA) Section in Sports, Andrew Swift, performed his own simulation study similar to EPSN using one million simulations rather than the 1000 used by EPSN. Similar results were obtained with the increased number of simulations. In his interview with ESPN Outside the Lines, Swift commented that "the draws that we observed could only happen with a chance of about 1 in 300,000". This, he says, is "about the same as flipping a coin 18 times in a row and getting a heads every time." Swift offers as a possible explanation that there is simply a problem with the software used to randomly generate the seeding.
USTA Pro Circuit Director Brian Earley, who is in charge of seeding at the US Open, saw the results presented by ESPN in an interview and asked what the US Open had to gain by not randomly assigning the opponents of the top two seeds in the first round. While there are some obvious answers to this (for example, seeing two big name players survive longer in the tournament would presumably increase viewership and thus advertising revenues), I doubt anyone is intentionally rigging easier matches for the top 2 seeds. Nonetheless, the evidence seems to be fairly strong that something strange is going on here. It is completely reasonable to suspect that the US Open draw is neither rigged nor random
Here's a portion of the article on this subject:
Past Chairman of the American Statistical Association (ASA) Section in Sports, Andrew Swift, performed his own simulation study similar to EPSN using one million simulations rather than the 1000 used by EPSN. Similar results were obtained with the increased number of simulations. In his interview with ESPN Outside the Lines, Swift commented that "the draws that we observed could only happen with a chance of about 1 in 300,000". This, he says, is "about the same as flipping a coin 18 times in a row and getting a heads every time." Swift offers as a possible explanation that there is simply a problem with the software used to randomly generate the seeding.
USTA Pro Circuit Director Brian Earley, who is in charge of seeding at the US Open, saw the results presented by ESPN in an interview and asked what the US Open had to gain by not randomly assigning the opponents of the top two seeds in the first round. While there are some obvious answers to this (for example, seeing two big name players survive longer in the tournament would presumably increase viewership and thus advertising revenues), I doubt anyone is intentionally rigging easier matches for the top 2 seeds. Nonetheless, the evidence seems to be fairly strong that something strange is going on here. It is completely reasonable to suspect that the US Open draw is neither rigged nor random
