Poll: Is the selection committee obsolete?

[visitingcock]

There’s slot wrong with the selection committee and it’s vague guidelines but is it time for a change? More human element or less?

 

[Bigboote]

I voted keep it but. I think the human element is important and would hate to see the eye test dropped. Algorithms are only as good as the people designing them. I personally find the NET a joke. Maybe-kinda-sorta a guide, but a guide at best. I tend to find Massey quite a bit more believable, but some of those rankings leave me shaking my head too. There are things that a person can see that a mathematical formula can't.

The "but" part: The system seems opaque and I'd like to see it clarified, not a bit but a lot. There are if memory serves of order 16 evaluation criteria, but there are no weights given to them. That's an awful lot of criteria, and each one could be 1% or 90% of what any one committee member considers. I'd find it more palatable if there were of order four broad categories, each having one or more of the 16 criteria. Each category would be weighted 25 %, and within that category, each criterion could have whatever weight the committee member gave it. I'd suggest that one category would just be eye-test type stuff that might include overall team performance but also players likely to have an impact in March; one have metrics like NET, wins above bubble, and such; one with things like early vs recent results, improvement over the season and such; one for performance against better teams vs. cupcakes I don't remember what all the criteria are, but however they could be shoehorned into 4-5 broader categories.

 

[TheFarmFan]

We need someone to blame. The reason why everyone hated the BCS was because the "computers" couldn't ever provide a rationale, just an output. And I do think some nuance goes into thinking about injuries, availability, peaking, etc.

 

[typhaon]

I think the definition of what makes a team deserving for the NCAAT should be clarified.

 

[LwrcasefaN]

An algorithm would just be a computerized committee. It won’t get rid of all the varying opinions and disagreements on who should be in or out. And all the questions and discussions will be amongst humans …not computers. If humans develop the basis for the algorithm, then stick to humans.

 

[WBBTakeover]

Keep the human element. Numbers can be manipulated. We can see with our own eyes that Stanford, Nebraska and Mississippi State do not belong in the field.

 

[Puppy Love]

The biggest beef that I have (and I realize people may not agree with this) is that teams that win their conference should not have to play in the First Four. There needs to be a reward for winning your conference tournament.

 

[visitingcock]

There’s slot wrong with the selection committee and it’s vague guidelines but is it time for a change? More human element or less?

 

[Bigboote]

The biggest beef that I have (and I realize people may not agree with this) is that teams that win their conference should not have to play in the First Four. There needs to be a reward for winning your conference tournament.

I absolutely agree with you and have said it before, and, yes, some folks disagree.

 

[visitingcock]

Keep the human element. Numbers can be manipulated. We can see with our own eyes that Stanford, Nebraska and Mississippi State do not belong in the field.

I have a problem with too much emphasis on the conference tournaments. The win the regular season over 16-18 games. Then lose one game in a short tournament and you lose the AQ.

Okay, I don’t really have a bitch about it for p4 teams but it really sucks for one bid conferences.

 

[Puppy Love]

I have a problem with too much emphasis on the conference tournaments. The win the regular season over 16-18 games. Then lose one game in a short tournament and you lose the AQ.

Okay, I don’t really have a bitch about it for p4 teams but it really sucks for one bid conferences.

How about the AQ went to best record in conference including the tournament games?

 

[typhaon]

What I don't like is when you have P4 teams making the Tournament with seasons that can get their coach fired and MM schools don't make the Tournament with seasons that might get their coach a 3-year extension.

Like I said above, I think there needs to be clarity about what the Tournament is supposed to be. Is it supposed to be the 68 empirically best teams, working around the inconvenience of AQs or is it supposed to lean more in a direction of rewarding relatively outstanding seasons?

There is certainly room to expand the field some (byes for the very top seeds), but I think there also needs to be some bottom-line limiting criteria (ex. including conference tournament games, must be no more than 1-game below .500 vs. conference opponents). I don't think just adding 13th/14th place teams from P4 conferences is making a better tournament - despite (perhaps valid) claims that those teams could defeat some 25-win team from a MM more than 5 times out of 10. We've seen those teams play all season. We've seen them in their conference tournaments. They are not outstanding. Enough! 😂

I don't despise the NET as a tool. But, I also think there's a point at which it doesn't tell you who had a "good" season and who didn't.

I'm not crazy about the WBIT and see no need for it.

 

[Bigboote]

I have a problem with too much emphasis on the conference tournaments. The win the regular season over 16-18 games. Then lose one game in a short tournament and you lose the AQ.

Okay, I don’t really have a bitch about it for p4 teams but it really sucks for one bid conferences.

Each conference makes its own rule for who gets the AQ. It was the season winner in the Ivy till not too long ago. I think 20-30 years ago there were one or two conferences who still sent the season winner, probably including the conference tourney games, but eventually figured that the tourney didn’t mean enough.

 

[Gamecockfan77]

people will bitch anyway you slice it whether it makes sense or not.

I'd like to see fewer big conference teams that are going nowhere get in but on the WBB side there just isn't much mid-major depth to fill in.

 

[Phil]

I have a problem with too much emphasis on the conference tournaments. The win the regular season over 16-18 games. Then lose one game in a short tournament and you lose the AQ.

Okay, I don’t really have a bitch about it for p4 teams but it really sucks for one bid conferences.

I appreciate the concern but let's examine the implications of acting on this concern.

First let's summarize the problem:

Consider a conference with a dozen teams. Over the course of the season, one or two teams separate themselves at the top of the pack — I'll call those the A-Teams. Two or three or four are decent and just behind the A-Teams, so we will call them the B- teams, and then there are the other six or seven teams which we will call the C teams.

Under the present approach we get to the end of the regular season and then go to the conference tournament where most people think one of the A teams will win, but fans of the B teams and even the C teams hold out some hope. 80% of the time, one of the A teams win, another 15% of the time, one of the B team catches fire and ends up winning the conference, and maybe 5% of the time, one of the C teams has an incredible run and ends up winning the conference. An even rarer circumstance, one of those C teams might be under 500 on the season.

So the problem is that it's very discouraging to be a fan of one of the A teams, watching and following your team all season, hoping and maybe even planning on getting to the national tournament, but lightning strikes, you don't win the conference and some weak team gets to go to the national conference without much of a chance to win a single game much less go deep into the tournament.

Yes, a problem but what's the solution?

The obvious solution is to argue that you played an entire regular-season, why not declare that the entire regular-season should count for something and declare that the winner of the regular-season gets the bid to the national tournament?

As an important aside, because I presume this question was raised by an SEC fan, I believe the SEC was the only conference that declared the conference winner was the regular season winner. I don't know whether that's still the case and it may be moot because it may be just semantics as it didn't affect the selection for the national tournament. (Yes, the Ivy League used to be a very special case but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.)

However, if you select the regular-season conference champion as the team to go to the national tournament, you solved one problem, but created two other problems.

First, what's the point of even having a conference tournament if the conference tournament merely gets bragging rights? They don't even get to call themselves conference champions because that term ought to be reserved for the team that goes to the national tournament, so they get to call themselves the conference champion and that's it. A lot of expense and travel for almost nothing.


But wait, there's more. If you send the conference regular-season winner to the national tournament, then partway through the regular-season, virtually all the C teams have virtually no postseason meaningful opportunities. Three quarters of the way through the regular-season and the B teams can see the writing on the wall, and the only teams playing with anything on the line are the A teams and you better hope there's more than one or we'll have everyone playing for nothing.

Which means you ought to eliminate the conference tournament and recognize that fans of most teams have nothing to look forward to for most of the season. I think that would be the deathknell of the sport.

It's obviously upsetting to fans of the A teams when a C team catches fire and wins a conference tournament, but the media loves the stories and it makes up a significant part of the excitement of the tournament.

 

[packwrap]

A league has a choice to award their NCAA bid to either the season or tourney champ.

Basically, all leagues have now decided on the tourney champ.

Why?
Creates buzz, TV ratings, ticket sales and media coverage for the league tourney.

At least creates the possibility of 2 ncaa bids for a small league. If a C team wins tourney in an upset, only the league champ would go to NCAA. By awarding this C team the ncaa bid, league has chance that season winners might also still get in as an at large.

 

[typhaon]

Here's another version of a criteria that might work:

Any team that finishes with 25+ D1 wins and 1st or 2nd in their conference gets an AL bid. You could pick your normal heavily NET-influenced "68" using the current criteria - then just add however many of those "25+" teams. Doing a quick glance, this season, I think there will probably be about 4 or 5 teams that would get added... so you have a field of 73, let's say. Maybe next year there are 7 and you have a field of 75... I don't think would present any problem not having the exact same number of teams each year.

 

[visitingcock]

A league has a choice to award their NCAA bid to either the season or tourney champ.

Basically, all leagues have now decided on the tourney champ.

Why?
Creates buzz, TV ratings, ticket sales and media coverage for the league tourney.

At least creates the possibility of 2 ncaa bids for a small league. If a C team wins tourney in an upset, only the league champ would go to NCAA. By awarding this C team the ncaa bid, league has chance that season winners might also still get in as an at large.

or it risks sending a 14-14 team to the tournament instead of a 21-6 regular season champ that has a +40-ish NET