re: How do these tournament locations make any sense?

I think at this point they should just call them A, B, C, D or Red, White, Blue, Gold or I, II, III, IV.

When they switched to co-locating 1st and 2nd Round games for multiple regions back whenever, the whole East, South, Midwest, West thing should have gone away if they weren't actually going to pick host cities which work for both areas (like say, St. Louis for a Midwest/South or Charlotte for a East/South early round host).