I'm going to try playing contrarian.
The media is in lockstep declaring that Maryland is being punished for its weak schedule. I think a case can be made that the committee has bumped them up considerably, by underplaying their schedule weakness.
Let me 'splain.
A long time ago, the NCAA decided that they didn't want to encourage teams running up the score to puff up their rankings (as an aside, is that a legitimate function of the NCAA?) so they invented a measure, the RPI, which explicitly excludes margin of victory (MOV). Presumably, they weren't smart enough to figure out how to devise a metric which incorporates MOV without overly encouraging blowouts.
As is well-known, the RPI is a horrendous metric early in the season, and gets better throughout the season. By the time of the Selection decision, it isn't horrible, although it is deficient,
The Selection Committee does look at a whole host of numbers, but explicitly claims to ignore the two major polls, perhaps deluding themselves into thinking that the Selection Committee might not look at the polls.
The RPI, as is well known, has three component, one of which is your own record, another component (weighted the largest) based upon your opponents records, and another component based on their opponents records.
Maryland was ranked 19 in the RPI at the time of the first reveal, and has climbed all the way to 17 yesterday,
They were ranked 9th in this first reveal, and again last night.
This means that the selection committee isn't over-weighting SOS as you might think based upon media reports, but deliberating under-weighting it.
I don't mean to suggest that the committee has to blindly follow the RPI – there would be no need for a committee if you simply followed a formula, but by assigning Maryland to the ninth position, they are starting with the position suggested by RPI and adjusting it based upon other factors to get to position 9. Those factors, whatever they are, result in a material upward move relative to RPI. They may be looking at the eye test, or wins over highly ranked teams, and deliberately giving more weight than would be given by the RPI.
The media talks as if the starting point is the #3 ranking in the human polls, and that the committee is adjusting downward based upon some factor such as SOS.
That isn't the case, they start with a 19 or 17 ranking and move the team materially up.
We can debate whether the move up is enough, too much or not enough. If we think they deserve to be higher, it ought to re-open the debate about the RPI. (But it won't)
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