We’re going to have plenty of time to discuss the 2015 NCAA Tournament.
Which teams are going to make the Final Four? Which teams will be the trendy round-of-64 upset picks? What’s going to be the best round-of-32 matchup on Saturday or Sunday?
Don’t worry — we’ll deal with those questions soon enough. We’ll examine Kentucky on its path to history. We’ll tell you more about Virginia and whether the Cavaliers are underrated or not.
For now, though, let’s deal only with the selection, seeding and bracketing work done by the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee. Here are the five big stories from Sunday evening’s pairings:
*
5 – GEORGETOWN AS A FOUR SEED
The Hoyas’ profile is here. Consider, as a point of comparison, North Carolina, another fourth seed. The Tar Heels at least went on a run in the ACC tournament and posted a win over an upper-tier Virginia squad. Georgetown barely beat the last-place team in the conference, Creighton, in the Big East quarterfinals. The Hoyas were then outplayed by Xavier — dominated for most of the night — en route to an exit in the Big East semis. Georgetown owned a win over Villanova… and very little else. Two wins over Butler were solid, but the Hoyas lost to Butler in a third meeting earlier in the season. The Hoyas were swept by both Providence and Xavier. That’s a 6-seed profile.
I know that I don’t get too upset about a team being mis-seeded by two lines. Three seed lines represents a truly terrible mistake. However, when a team gets a protected (top-four) seed as the result of a two-seed-line error, that stands out.
4 – A MIXED BAG ON THE TOP TWO SEED LINES
The rise of Wisconsin prevented the Kentucky-Wisconsin 1-2 regional pairing many feared in the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday. The 1 and 2 seeds, spread across the four regions, are really not that bad. The committee did a reasonably good job on this front.
However, the team that has to be rethinking its non-conference scheduling philosophy is Kansas. Bill Self always schedules the toughest non-conference games in the country. He manipulates the RPI more than any other Power 5 coach. This is supposed to give Kansas a bracket edge, however, and in each of the last two NCAA tournaments, the Jayhawks have gotten the short end of the stick.
Last year, Kansas was the 2 in the South, paired with Florida, the No. 1 overall seed. The Jayhawks received a miserable placement in return for their scheduling efforts.
This year, Kansas “stayed home” in the Midwest, but all that means is being trapped in the same region as another No. 1 overall seed from the SEC, Kentucky.
Kansas’ non-conference scheduling has not been rewarded. For all the ways in which the power conferences were protected in this bracket, the Jayhawks have a very legitimate gripe. Gonzaga should have been the 2 in the Midwest, Kansas the 2 in the South.
3 – THE SELECTION SUNDAY GAME PROBLEM
The number one problem with Selection Sunday tournament finals is not the “how can we come up with a bracket?” issue. It’s that the teams playing in those games face potentially short turnarounds if they play at a Thursday-Saturday opening-weekend pod.
Should a team headed for the NCAA tournament (teams that play in the finals of Power 5 or mid-tier leagues generally are…) have to wear itself out with three games in three days, and then get only three days off (one or more of them consumed by travel) before its next game? If all conference tournaments ended on Saturday, all teams could recharge a little more and not face as quick a turnaround. Placing teams in Thursday-Saturday pods would not be as difficult or as weighty.
Look at what we have, though, with this bracket:
Kentucky, Arkansas, VCU, Dayton, Georgia State, and SMU — six of the eight NCAA tournament teams involved in Sunday tournament finals — have to play their round-of-64 games on Thursday. There’s no real chance for them to savor what they did this weekend. Consider in particular SMU, which had to fly up to Hartford for The American’s tournament; must now fly home to Dallas; and must then jet back to Louisville very soon for a Thursday game.
That’s terrible. It’s terrible in that it prevents kids from relishing the journey to the tourney. It’s terrible in that it will make teams reconsider how much they should try to win conference tournaments. It’s terrible in that it puts supposed “student-athletes” through a nasty logistical grinder. This part of the process has to be fixed.
There should be no tournament games on Selection Sunday, but since there are still games — and still will be — the committee has to be able to place Sunday teams in Friday-Sunday NCAA tournament pods. That’s one of the committee’s jobs… or at least, it should be.
2 – DAYTON AND THE DOMINOES
The treatment of Dayton was incredibly, egregiously wrong on two fronts, and unfortunately, another team will have to suffer the consequences.
First, Dayton was the last team in the field, as shown by the 1-68 seeding list:
Here is the committee's official 1-68 list. Dayton was the last team in. pic.twitter.com/lROuN2aqy1
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) March 15, 2015
That’s a problem. Dayton should not have been particularly close to the cut line, especially after winning two Atlantic 10 tournament games and narrowly losing in the final to VCU.
The second problem is one Boise State must deal with. The Broncos should have no complaint about having to play a First Four game, but Leon Rice’s team should be steamed that it has to play a road game. There’s really no excuse whatsoever for Dayton to get a home game. Did the committee actually think it was impossible to move the Flyers up one seed line? This happens all the time. This is such a preventable bracketing error, but the committee didn’t think so.
All this underscores why a three-person independent panel needs to be in the war room on Selection Sunday, able to vet the bracket and (by unanimous vote) veto any decisions it views as appalling mistakes. We need that policy tweak in future years.
1 – UCLA IN, TEMPLE AND COLORADO STATE OUT
Here’s the essential point to make about the selection part of the tournament arrangement process: There will always be debatable selections at the back end of the field near the cut line. If you’re near the bubble and you don’t make it, you’ve left some room for doubt in some way.
The one thing a snubbed team deserves, though, is for its spot to be taken by another team that achieved enough to put itself in the discussion. Last year, North Carolina State at least managed to beat Syracuse (a No. 3 seed) in the ACC tournament quarterfinals. The Wolfpack at least showed they deserved a bid. That was a debatable snub (one I didn’t agree with), but one I understood, especially since SMU scheduled no one in the 2013-2014 non-conference portion of that season.
This year, there was a snub even worse than SMU last season, precisely because the dynamics in place a year ago were not in evidence in 2015.
Temple did not duck opponents in the non-conference portion of its schedule. Also from The American — like SMU in 2014 — Temple scheduled very differently when compared to the Mustangs a year ago. Temple scheduled Duke, Villanova and Kansas, and if a bubble team wins at least one of those three games without tossing in too many bad losses, you would expect it to get in. Temple beat Kansas by 25. Yes, the Owls did lose to UNLV and Saint Joseph’s, but they played people and beat a top-2 seed. That’s a lot more than SMU did last season, with fewer bad losses than what SMU brought to the table.
UCLA must have done something to clearly eclipse Temple, right?
Uhhhh, no.
The Bruins did play Oklahoma and North Carolina in the Battle 4 Atlantis. They did schedule Gonzaga and Kentucky. However, they got whacked in all four games, losing each by double-figure margins. The Bruins suffered more head-scratching losses than Temple did, falling at Alabama, at Colorado, and at Arizona State.
Let’s drill a little deeper here: RPI rankings are not everything in the selection process, but you need to look at the final Selection Sunday RPI report. Don’t focus on the RPI numbers, but look at the road and netural-court records, key parts of the so-called “nitty gritty” sheet the Selection Committee uses to make its decisions. UCLA’s road-neutral numbers were awful, and one neutral-court win came over USC (the last-place team in the Pac-12) in the Pac-12 tournament. Temple’s road-neutrals were far stronger.
Texas, BYU, Indiana, Georgia, Purdue, Ole Miss, Boise State — you could all make cases for or against those teams. They all had a legitimate argument for being in the field of 68.
UCLA simply did not, beyond that one shiny win over Utah, a 5 seed. Temple, again, beat a 2 seed (Kansas).
This tweet accurately frames the situation, underscoring why Temple and also Colorado State (the Rams were a top-30 RPI team) were shafted while UCLA got in to bump up those CBS/Turner television ratings.
This tweet does the same:
https://twitter.com/BPredict/status/577239323109670912
If the question raised here does involve other examples from the past — and we’re not sure if any exist — the number of examples can surely be counted on one hand:
Colorado State is about to become the only team in history with Top 30 RPI and 5 Top 100 wins to be left out, right? @ESPNStatsInfo
— Yesh Ginsburg (@yesh222) March 15, 2015
Questionable selections are part of the deal when the bubble is involved. The unforgivable selection sin is to snub a team in favor of one that has no real case to make. That’s what the committee did with UCLA getting in and both Temple and Colorado State going to the NIT.
