Let’s look at the original pots from the 2014 World Cup Draw to get some perspective:

With Pots 2–4 being fixed by geography, you couldn’t help but imagine that the 2013 version of the United States national team were a bit unlucky to be placed in arguably the weakest pot based on rankings, and that they would have preferred the seeded system that FIFA rolled out a few days ago.

Now, let’s fast-forward to present day and imagine what the draw might look like in a few months. I cheated and opted to fill in the pots based on the teams I expect to qualify based on a combination of form and the difficulty of their remaining qualifying schedule, but all of the rankings are as of September 15, 2017.

This is a very fluid situation since many of these teams might not even qualify, but it’s nevertheless fun to play Carnac and see how the confederation limit might lead to interesting groups in draw simulations.