Bracketology vs the AP

[RegisteredUconn]

Creating brackets is difficult. I get that. There will always be gripes, some of them legitimate. Still, is it really necessary to establish guidelines so at odds with the notion that each team enjoy a reasonably fair path to the ultimate objective that following those rules results in patently unfair paths?

The AP poll is probably one of the better overall rankings of the nation's top teams. Charlie Crème is likely a skilled and well-meaning practitioner of the bracketological arts. So, how well do the brackets devised by applying NCAA selection principles match one that uses a simple S-curve of the AP poll? Not all that well, that's how.

I've limited my observations to the top 16 teams. In a perfectly fair world, each region/bracket would have a top group of four teams whose ranks would sum to 34, or an average rank of 8.5. For example, the region with the top overall team would consist of the nation's #1, #8, #9, and #16 teams. Another region would have #2, #7, #10, and #15. A third would have #3, #6, #11, and #14. The region with the lowest number 1 seed would consist of #4, #5, #12, and #13.

Instead of fair paths for all, we get:
Louisville Region: #1 Connecticut, #3 Louisville, #10, Duke, and #13 North Carolina.
South Bend Region: #2 Notre Dame, #6 Tennessee, #8 Maryland, and #17 Purdue.
Lincoln Region: #5 South Carolina, #9 Baylor, #15 Texas A&M, and #16 Nebraska.
Stanford Region: #4 Stanford, #7 West Virginia, #11 Penn State, and #12, Kentucky.

Louisville region has an average rank of 6.75
South Bend region has an average rank of 8.25.
Stanford region has an average rank of 8.5.
And the Lincoln region has an average rank of a whopping 11.25. Can you say WTF? I knew that you could.

I seriously wonder if the selection committee will deliver such grossly unequal pairings (garbage out) by assiduously applying their goofy (no offense to Stewie) rules (garbage in).

 

[Phil]

Well, you said you understood that creating brackets is tough, so I'll try to illustrate why it is so.

Without even considering the geographical constraints.

You would put #2, #7, #10, and #15 in one region. That puts Notre Dame and Duke in the same region. Two teams who have faced each other twice, and may well again. (I know some are concerned about UConn and Louisville, so let me know whether that type of match up is one you would avoid or not).

Would you be ready to defend that seeding against ND and Duke fans?

 

[RegisteredUconn]

Well, you said you understood that creating brackets is tough, so I'll try to illustrate why it is so.

Without even considering the geographical constraints.

You would put #2, #7, #10, and #15 in one region. That puts Notre Dame and Duke in the same region. Two teams who have faced each other twice, and may well again. (I know some are concerned about UConn and Louisville, so let me know whether that type of match up is one you would avoid or not).

Would you be ready to defend that seeding against ND and Duke fans?

And the "bracketology" effort pits #1 against #3, who also played twice thus far. If you are asking whether I'd favor a bracket pitting #2 and #10 or one matching #1 and #3, I'd definitely choose the former.

 

[Phil]

Well I was hoping to take it one step at a time, and address the problems in your proposed seeding, then discuss the thornier problem of geography.

The geography constraints arise because we are still in less than an ideal economic situation which affects attendance (not the only thing, but one of the contributors.)

The women's basketball championship is the single largest money loser of all the NCAA championships, and they felt they needed to address the financial considerations.

One of the ways they have done that is to impose some geographical rules on the seeding, essentially saying they concede they will have to give up something in perceived fairness in exchange for reducing the travel costs of teams (which reduces the NCAA cots) and which also reduces the costs for fan travel (which should help increase revenue).

Do you disagree that financial considerations should be part of the process? Because it isn't hard to create a better bracket if you don't care about costs, but it is quite a bit harder if you accept that geography should be considered.

I think geography, regretfully, has to be a consideration. I think I could do a better job of incorporating it, but I think it is fair to make it a consideration. What do you think?

 

[triaddukefan]

That would be an easy bracket for UCONN, actually any of them would be. I'd say put Baylor as UConn's #2.... Louisville as South Carolina's #2, Tenn or WVU as ND's #2.... and Maryland as Stanford's #2.

 

[Alydar]

"I think geography, regretfully, has to be a consideration. I think I could do a better job of incorporating it, but I think it is fair to make it a consideration. What do you think?"



Geography and money shouldn't trump competitive fairness. Not with the sums the NCAA collects from football & MBB. If they want a fancy tournament that costs a lot. And just because you'd have to spend a pittance compared to the profits from other sources to cover the costs, there is no reason to compromise competitive fairness. If they can't afford it then reduce the field to 32 and get rid of the automatic bids entirely.

I have a return question for you: Which is more desirable, having the top overall seed be punished by having to play a 2 seed on the 2 seed's home court for the fourth game between the 2 in the E8, while the worst 1 seed gets to play in Lincoln against the 3rd best 2 seed , OR should the overall top seed and their fans have to fly an additional half hour to go to Nebraska?

The NCAA has in essence abandoned the "regional" aspect of the 3rd and 4th rounds this year. 90% of the quality BB is played in the Eastern and Southern areas of the US and yet there are no sites there. I don't see why they should cling to geography with placing teams after throwing it into the garbage with respect to awarding sites.

Geography and money shouldn't trump competitive fairness.

 

[Phil]

I have a return question for you: Which is more desirable, having the top overall seed be punished by having to play a 2 seed on the 2 seed's home court for the fourth game between the 2 in the E8, while the worst 1 seed gets to play in Lincoln against the 3rd best 2 seed , OR should the overall top seed and their fans have to fly an additional half hour to go to Nebraska? .

On the first point there is no question. And I will be unhappy if it happens, if only because I wrote to the committee some time ago with a proposed solution. If they end up sending us to Louisville and blaming their rules, I'm going to point out that they not only had time to make minor changes to the principles and procedures, they were told explicitly, some time ago, that this would be a problem and could be avoided.

The NCAA has in essence abandoned the "regional" aspect of the 3rd and 4th rounds this year. 90% of the quality BB is played in the Eastern and Southern areas of the US and yet there are no sites there. I don't see why they should cling to geography with placing teams after throwing it into the garbage with respect to awarding sites.

Geography and money shouldn't trump competitive fairness.

On the second point, I agree that the site selection committee fell down. All they had to do is superimpose a map of the locations of the likely teams over the possible locations, and they would have seen they were creating a problem. How ironic that they made a decision to allow teams to host precisely so they could increase attendance, and chose locations that are further away from teams and fans than some of the sites they turned down.

 

[RegisteredUconn]

Well I was hoping to take it one step at a time, and address the problems in your proposed seeding, then discuss the thornier problem of geography.

The geography constraints arise because we are still in less than an ideal economic situation which affects attendance (not the only thing, but one of the contributors.)

The women's basketball championship is the single largest money loser of all the NCAA championships, and they felt they needed to address the financial considerations.

One of the ways they have done that is to impose some geographical rules on the seeding, essentially saying they concede they will have to give up something in perceived fairness in exchange for reducing the travel costs of teams (which reduces the NCAA cots) and which also reduces the costs for fan travel (which should help increase revenue).

Do you disagree that financial considerations should be part of the process? Because it isn't hard to create a better bracket if you don't care about costs, but it is quite a bit harder if you accept that geography should be considered.

I think geography, regretfully, has to be a consideration. I think I could do a better job of incorporating it, but I think it is fair to make it a consideration. What do you think?

I appreciate and enjoy a geographic component in national competitions. I find myself rooting for Connecticut teams in the Little League World Series for no other reason than we share a connection through our state. I think I enjoyed the NCAA championship more when the regions were the East, South, Midwest, and West and teams competing in those regions were from those regions. The trouble was that regional geography alone couldn't seem to offer reasonably equal paths through to the post-regional, i.e., the Final Four, phase of the competition.

I find it disturbing on a gut level, however, that UConn and Louisville would be matched up in the same region. What possible justification other than some slavish devotion to nonsense could there be to set up a fourth meeting of two teams prior to the finals? I'm trying to think of some way two teams could play four times except where they are members of the same conference and I'm not having any luck. Teams could have an OOC game and also play in one of the in-season tournaments. Could they also play OOC and two in-season events, one of the holiday tourneys and the Maggie Dixon, say, and be matched again in regional play? Sounds pretty far fetched. So I'll proceed with the assumption that a fourth meeting will occur between schools in the same conference.

It's possible to imagine a setting where two teams could meet a fourth time in a region, rather than the Final Four. A low ranked conference mate (who played two regular season conference games and again in the conference tournament) could be placed as low seeded team in the same region as a higher ranked mate without ruffling too many feathers. That's not the scenario we're discussing. We have two teams that (supposedly) reasonable, knowledgeable experts say are among the best 3 in the nation that need to be shoe-horned into the same region to satisfy some lunatic standards. Haven't we (some of us anyway) already admitted that using geography alone (Ease, Southeast, Midwest, West) was a poor criteria for selecting brackets? Now that that's been fixed we're going to use geography to again screw up the brackets?

So what exactly is the principle so inviolate that it can't be sacrificed even at the expense of setting up a possible fourth meeting between two top 8 rated conference mates prior to post-regional play? Seriously, I have no idea. Coach Walz has already said he'd prefer to meet UConn in the Final Four rather than the Louisville Regional, sacrificing the advantage of playing at home for the greater advantage to his program of playing in the Final Four. I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised to find the majority of college coaches agree with him.

Should financial considerations be part of setting up the regions? Finances play a part in just about everything. Unfortunately, I know so little about how they impact the NCAA tournament, that I'm unable to add much light to that conversation except to say that the difference in flight costs between Hartford/Louisville and Hartford/Lincoln is a nit.