World Cup 2014 draw is out.

[muriel_volestrangler]

22. Because they work to spread continents around the groups

They had a very complicated draw to make sure no group had 3 European sides, and no group had 2 South American (or other) teams. They try to avoid matches that happen often in qualifying, or in continental tournaments.

Does the NCAA tournament have a group stage like this? Because that method still produces 'groups of death', as far as some are concerned - the #16 team find itself competing, most likely, for the runner-up spot with the #17 team (with one team most likely to beat both, and one team most likely to lose to both - so it probably hangs on the result of one match). #15 v. #18 is also pretty close, and so on. Meanwhile, you know you'll get a group of 8,9,24 and 25 - almost certainly 8 and 9 will go through, so it's just a matter of which gets the winner spot for a hopefully easier match against a runner-up in the next round.

For fun, what your system would produce, from the Nov 28 rankings, is (ignoring any home advantage for Brazil):
Spain Croatia Côte d'Ivoire Australia
Germany Chile France Korea Republic
Argentina USA Mexico Cameroon
Colombia England Bosnia-Herzegovina Japan
Portugal Greece Russia Iran
Uruguay Belgium Ecuador Honduras
Italy Brazil Ghana Nigeria
Switzerland Netherlands Algeria Costa Rica

http://www.fifa.com/worldranking/rankingtable/

However, it's notable that the FIFA rankings are a bit dodgy - if you look at how much they've moved since the previous month (and the 7 seeds to head each group, along with Brazil, were based on the October rankings for some reason), you see Portugal climbed 9 places, and Belgium dropped 6; Mexico climbed 4, Bosnia dropped 5, and so on. With that much variation in a month, there may not be much point in putting too much faith in it (I think it's been criticised for not taking the strength of opposition enough into account). Just draw at random, and you may as well try to mix up continents to get matches you don't often get, just for interest.