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It's time that the NCAA tournament selection committee gives up the ghost. Right now we allow them to toss around all sorts of conflicting elements that go into seeding. There's the RPI, there's how you finish the season, there's your entire body of work, there's your out-of-conference schedule, there's your conference's strength, your good wins balanced out against your good losses -- you name it and there's a seeding theory out there that's important to someone. Worst of all there's the subjective eye test, as in, your resume doesn't reflect it but we just know you're really good. We can tell. Great. Just what you want to do, play an entire season and then have someone say the results don't matter because we can subjectively determine that another team is better.
But you know what all this means? It means that the members of the NCAA tournament selection committee can take arbitrary and unjustifiable seeding positions without recourse. Why? Because if you don't set out a formula or a rationale to justify seeding then you can latch on to whichever of these rationales you select and choose them to justify the decisions you make. What's more you can avoid having to affirmatively engage any argument against your decision by altering the parameters of the debate and selecting the criteria most favorable to you.
Fans, such as me, destroy the BCS because it's the only true joke in American sports today. It's utterly indefensible. But at least the BCS has a system to select a championship game. Would anyone truly object to the BCS being used to seed an eight- or 16-team playoff? Because right now in college basketball there's no true system for ranking teams when it comes to the selection committee. Teams don't know whether they are in or out, coaches don't know, and neither do their fans.
This may seem a bit radical, but why don't we eliminate the selection committee entirely and use a system similar to the BCS rankings to seed all teams from 1-65? It removes the uncertainty regarding what teams need to do to be inside or outside the bubble. You'd know each day of the year. Conference champions who weren't otherwise ranked inside the top 65 would simply mean that the top 65 teams wouldn't all get in (they don't anyway). It might be the top 34 or the top 45.
What it would do is eliminate the arbitrariness of 11 people sitting in a room and selectively seeding teams. People who are smarter than me could come up with the right mix of computer rankings, RPI, and polls that would compose the rankings. Then, bang, you seed the teams 1-65 based on these parameters. You could either keep the four regions and 1-16 seeds or you could simply seed teams 1-65 so that the final four teams would be seeded to play 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3. It would be an S-curve that actually works from top to bottom. As opposed to the 2008's committee's S-curve that only extends to the 1 seeds. (When asked recently whether it was accurate to say that Tennessee was the overall #8 and last 2 seed, the committee chairman said they weren't. That they put Tennessee in Charlotte because it was closer to Knoxville than the other regions. That means that the logic of the S-curve only extends down to the four top seeds. Which, you guessed it, is completely illogical.)
Right now there's a misperception that seeding doesn't matter and that once the brackets are out you have to win the games anyway so you shouldn't care about where you end up seeded. Anytime someone points out a flaw in the committee's logic (such as, you know, the S-curve not being applied from the top to the bottom of the seedings) people say, "Oh, shut up and go win your games." These people are idiots. Seeding matters immensely. We're talking about a one game season here. For eight games in a row. It's common sense that the better the teams you play the more likely you are to lose any single game. No one with any intelligence would dispute this. But which team is the top 4 seed, the top 3 seed? You don't know for certain and neither do I. That's too arbitrary. It's time for the NCAA selection committee to go and for seeding matchups to be consistent.
Here are six other things worth noting that no one else seems to talk about:
1. Don't buy the upset hype. The NCAA tournament feeds on upsets because it helps draw in casual fans. But lots of times people look at the seeds beside the names as opposed to what the Vegas line is. I think this is because Vegas lines are supposed to dilute the purity of the game. Please. I'm not saying that you have to gamble, just that you should know what people who are putting real money on the game actually think. Underdogs who are favored: Kent State (9) over UNLV (8), Texas A&M (9) over BYU (8), Davidson (10) over Gonzaga (7). Even if you were just going to be one of those lame people who only picks the favorites in your brackets, you'd lose out on three games by picking the higher seed.
2. Paying attention to Vegas point spreads is doubly important if you're in one of those leagues that awards points based on picking upsets. Right now, for instance, Purdue is a 6 seed and Baylor is an 11 seed. Yet Purdue is just favored by 2.5 points. How about Vandy at a 4 seed only favored by 6.5 points over a 13 seed in Siena? Or Drake at a 5 seed favored by just 4 points over 12 seed Western Kentucky. Best of all? Six seed Oklahoma at a mere 1.5-point favorite over 11 seed St. Joe's. Each of these upsets should be on your bracket because the potential reward in upset points outweighs the risk.
3. No profession is bigger fans of the NCAA tournament than lawyers. None. Right now a large number of lawyer readers are nodding their heads at this. I've worked in several offices around the NCAA tourney and never seen anything like a law firm on Thursday and Saturday. No one does any work. But man do those .4's add up while you watch games on your computer. All the clients still get billed. See, everyone wins. (Clients excluded.)
4. My top upset pick: 3 seed Xavier gets 14 seed Georgia. This is tough for Xavier and a fundamental undervaluing of Georgia. Has an SEC team ever gotten seeded below 12? The answer, my friends, is no. Not in the modern era. Xavier is good but they're only a 7.5 point favorite. The lowest by a substantial margin of any top 3 seeded teams. The other most likely upset among the top 4 seeds according to Vegas? Winthrop over Washington State. Adjust your brackets accordingly.
5. Finally, our ClayNation Facebook group is growing rapidly. But by the time you read this you'll only have 24 hours remaining to chase after such magnanimous prizes as a $110 mini-basketball hoop and an interview in the column. Here's the link. Right now we've got one of the biggest groups on the web. For instance we're totally trouncing John McCain's bracket challenge which, I think, is a bad sign for McCain.
6. Not quite finally. Several of you want to know what my Final Four is. (On each of my bracket entries on different sites. I'm not one of those people with 38 different selections.) Here goes: Tennessee over Kansas and UCLA over Texas. UCLA is my national champion. But Bruce Pearl is still my hero.
