World Cup 2104 - Group of Death? It's actually Group D, but Group B and G are tough as well

Yeah, World cup starts today, so running the ruler over the groups to see which is the most likely to cause some upsets.

Generally, the way you calculate the "Group of Death" is to calculate the variance of the 4 teams in the pool based on their rankings and the group with the lowest variance would be the "Death" group. By this rational, it would be, in order of deadliest to easiest.

Group D (Uruguay, Costa Rica, England, Italy)
Group E (Switzerland, Ecuador, France, Honduras)
Group G (Germany, Portugal, Ghana, USA)
Group C (Columbia, Greece, Ivory Coast, Japan)
Group F (Argentina, Bosnia and H, Iran, Nigeria)
Group H (Belgium, Nigeria, Russia, South Korea)
Group A (Brazil, Mexico, Cameroon, Croatia)
Group B (Spain, Netherlands, Chile, Australia)

You can see the problem here. The traditional method says that Group B, the team containing 3 teams ranked in the top 15 is the easiest. This is due to the presence of my team (sigh), Australia which is ranked 62nd in the world, thus putting up the variance.

So a better method of calculating the Group of death is to find the variance of the top three teams and the variance of the 2nd and 3rd ranked team (as they are all fighting for 2 spots). Applying an equal weighting to each to get a total variance, we get the following order, from deadliest to easiest

Group D (Uruguay, Costa Rica, England, Italy)
Group B (Spain, Netherlands, Chile, Australia)
Group G (Germany, Portugal, Ghana, USA)
Group A (Brazil, Mexico, Cameroon, Croatia)
Group C (Columbia, Greece, Ivory Coast, Japan)
Group E (Switzerland, Ecuador, France, Honduras)
Group F (Argentine, Bosnia and H, Iran, Nigeria)
Group H (Belgium, Nigeria, Russia, South Korea)