How to Fix the Bias in the NCAA Selection Committee
After reading Christian Jensen’s post on
the hidden losses in conference realignment last week, my first thought concerned whether the athletic directors and conference commissioners might favor teams from their conferences due to the incredible monetary incentives to do just that.
A few days later I opened up
an article statistics
Prof. Jim Lackritz wants us read and analyze on the very subject, and just as I suspected there is statistically significant bias.
The article entitled “Evidence of Bias in NCAA Tournament Selection and Seeding” — which was published in March 2010 by Coleman, DuMond and Lynch — analyzed the 10 NCAA Tournaments between 1999-2008 and found “substantial evidence of bias” in both how the Committee selected the field and how it seeded it.
For example, Pac-10 squads had “more than
10,000 times better odds of receiving bids than comparable minor conference squads” and the Big 12 and Conference USA (pre-2006) teams also had a significantly better shot at earning a bid.
In addition, conference membership and the presence of a committee member from the respective conference was “statistically significant as they relate to the seed assigned to a given team, beyond that which would be expected based on [their] set of team performance factors.”
Back in 2008, each conference received $19,103 for the next six years for each NCAA Tournament game one of its schools played in, and this year each unit is worth $40,919, per
Forbes. That makes for an extraordinary economic incentive to ever so slightly shift the odds in your conference’s favor through favorable seeding or by letting a shaky bubble team from your conference join the field. In some ways, such a conference representative would not be responding to economic incentives if they didn’t at least try.
Now granted there are guidelines in place to prevent such cheating such as having biased parties sit out any discussions about their conference’s teams yet by talking about the other bubble teams involved they are still influencing the process.
In any case, whatever they were doing between 1999-08 clearly wasn’t working, at least according to this statistical study, and it certainly makes common sense that such committee members would respond to economic incentives since that seems to be all that people in college athletics do these days.
My radical solution to this problem entails completely altering the composition of the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee. Instead of conference commissioners and athletic directors who are inherently biased, why not turn it over to people without a horse in the race?
