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Message: [QUOTE="Plebe, post: 3445616, member: 6927"] All of this bracketology stuff is a bit like reaching into freezing water with one bare hand while blindfolded and trying to catch minnows. It's based on historical patterns of how committees have **tended** to interpret their own vaguely stated criteria for selecting and seeding teams. But the science is inexact, of course, and committee decisions from year to year are inherently unpredictable to some degree. RPI is just a starting point before the real analysis begins. The committee loves to see quality wins -- which for bubble teams generally means wins over teams in the the RPI top 50 -- but they also look at "bad losses," which is less clearly defined, but certainly any loss to a team outside the top 100 is a bad loss. I think of it as a sort of ledger system of credits and debits, where "quality wins" bolster a team's position and bad losses undercut it. Just exactly how much one helps and the other hurts is one of the more slippery parts of the analysis, but this is where the bid is either won or lost. The other thing to remember is that it's always a comparison game. People always try to look at one team in a vacuum, cherry-pick a couple of data points for said team, and then claim "they should be out" or "they should be in" based on the cherry-picked data points, without much thought for how they compare to other teams. As for Tennessee, they currently have one quality win over LSU, and just as importantly, they have zero losses to teams outside the top 50. It's a pretty mediocre resume, to be sure, but when you compare it to others in the "bubble" vicinity, other resumes have bigger holes. Here are just some of the teams that are hovering in the bubble area: [LIST] [*][B]Oklahoma State[/B] currently has zero wins over the RPI top 50 and a bad loss to #147 Texas Tech. Clearly their resume is behind Tennessee's. [*][B]West Virginia[/B] has better quality wins but has been tanking lately with 8 losses in their last 10 games, including a bad loss to Kansas State. Clearly behind Tennessee. [*][B]James Madison[/B]'s only top 50 win is over UCF, and they also have a bad loss to #168 Towson. Clearly behind Tennessee. [*][B]Bradley[/B] has a top 50 win over Drake but also has losses to #106 Liberty and a #82 Southern Illinois. Due to these two losses, their resume would have to be behind Tennessee's. [*][B]Western Kentucky[/B] has a quality win over Central Michigan but losses to #250 North Texas, #155 St. Mary's and #83 Rice. Again, clearly inferior to Tennessee's resume. [*][B]UCF[/B] also has a win over Central Michigan but losses to #156 Tulane as well as 3 losses to teams in the 51-100 range. Also behind Tennessee. [/LIST] Long story short: When it gets down to the nitty gritty, there wouldn't be 32 at-large teams with better resumes than what Tennessee currently has. As of now Tennessee is probably an 8 or 9 seed. [/QUOTE]

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