selection committee

Selection Sunday: 2012 NCAA Tournament

Shawn Siegel — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 02:27:22 -0800

Selection Sunday 2012 is on March 11th. CBS will announced the 68-team field (the 2nd year of the new format) beginning at 6 PM. This follows the completion of the Big Ten Championship, which is the last game before the Field is announced.

The 68 teams that make up the NCAA Tournament field are selected by the NCAA Selection Committee, made up of Athletic Directors and Conference Commissioners. The committee will have spent the prior week locked in a room, putting together the bracket. Shortly after the field is finalized, the NCAA Tournament bracket is announced on CBS, with the likes of Greg Gumbel, Greg Anthony, and Seth Davis in the studio. And immediately after that, you can find printable brackets and Tournament predictions here on Collegehoops.net.

For many college basketball fans, Selection Sunday evening is the best day of the college basketball season.. even surpassing the National Championship game. There is inevitably controversy over which "bubble" teams did or did not make the field, as well how the teams were seeded. Once the controversy dies down, the games begin shortly after on Tuesday, March 13th, as the "First Four" games take place before the Tournament-proper starts on Thursday.

The field consists of the following:

Automatic bids - These bids, 31 in all, go to conference champions. Of these bids, 30 go to conference tournament champions. Most conferences have their tournaments on the week preceding Selection Sunday. The Ivy League is the only conference that does not conduct a postseason tournament; in that conference, the regular-season champion receives the automatic bid.

At-large bids - These are schools that the NCAA selection committee deems worthy of a tournament bid. The NCAA tournament has 37 at-large bids available. The selection committee takes great care to treat teams fairly based on their overall resume, as opposed to being biased by team prestige and conference prestige. To this end, the committee uses various computer rankings, most notably the RPI. However, history has shown that the highest ranked RPI team not to make the tournament is almsot inevitably from a "mid-major" conference.

Here's the NCAA Selection Committee principles for putting together the bracket..

Check out Shawn Siegel's Bracketology for projections of who will be selected.

For more Selection Sunday information.. see the ole Wiki.

Bracketology: A History of Power Conference Bias

Shawn Siegel — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 19:39:33 -0800

Inevitably, when the committee announces the bracket on selection sunday, a "mid-major" will be highest ranked RPI team to be left out of the field.

Over the last 6 years, the highest RPI team not to make the field has consistently come from a non-BCS conference. In fact, over the last three years, the committee became even more biased. At least the 5 best RPI teams not to make the field were "mid-majors".

Is the committee biased? Or is something else at work? As I see it, there are 3 main possibilities for this pattern:

A) The committee is in fact biased towards power conference teams. The committee is blinded by the historical success of power conference schools and simply refuses to believe other schools are better.

B) The committee is not intentionally biased, but some part of the process leads them to make anti-mid-major decisions. For example, the committee perhaps unduly focuses on total Top 50 wins, and this gives an unfair advantage to power conference teams that have many more chances to get these wins (and because of college basketball's financial imbalance, these schools get even more Top 50 chances at home.)

C) The committee is actually completely unbiased, but the RPI is flawed. In this scenario, the RPI systematically overvalues smaller conference schools as compared to reality. As compared to other statistical rankings that take into account scoring margin or other criteria (such as the Sagarin, Ken Pomeroy, etc.), the RPI does not adequately rank teams.

Having spent time at the NCAA Mock Selection conference and being involved in Bracketology for many years, I don't think the committee is intentionally biased, nor do they have an agenda to keep mid-majors out. There's probably a mix of B and C at work. The RPI does in fact favor small-conference schools (which is why I believe the committee should/will ultimately move to a weighted ranking of RPI and another ranking), and the committee does put too much weight on the quantity of "big wins" teams have. The committee also probably gets sucked into what the national media says and have their own sub-conscious leanings as well.. these are people after all.

So what does all this mean for the 2012 Tournament? Once again, expect multiple mid-majors with sparkling records and sparkling RPI's to get left out in place of lower ranked RPI teams from power conferences.

The most likely suspects are:

#22 Colorado St

#35 Long Beach St

#37 Harvard

#38 Iona

#39 Oral Roberts

#44 Middle Tennessee

If I was a fan of one of these schools.. I'd be shaking in my boots if they didn't win their conference tournament. The selection committee is unlikely to break what has been a strong trend for many years.

The best RPI teams not to make the field, including the highest ranked BCS team not to make it:

2011

#35 Harvard
#42 Cleveland St

#43 Missouri St
#46 Saint Mary's
#50 Colorado St
#54 Marshall
#58 Boston College (ACC)

2010

#40 Rhode Island
#45 UAB
#47 Kent State
#53 Memphis
#54 Dayton
#55 Mississippi St (SEC)

2009

#34 San Diego St
#40 Creighton
#46 UAB
#47 Illinois St
#48 St. Mary's
#49 Niagara
#51 George Mason
#53 Tulsa
#54 Florida (SEC)

2008

#37 Illinois St
#39 Ole Miss (SEC)

2007

#29 Air Force
#36 Missouri St
#39 Bradley
#41 Florida St (ACC)

2006

#22 Hofstra
#24 Missouri St
#39 St. Joseph's
#40 Cincinnati (Big East)

These are not end of season (after the postseason) RPI's, but the RPI's going into the Tournament using realtimerpi.com. Although end of season RPI's are easily accessible, its a little bit harder to find RPI #'s as of selection sunday, and some of these #'s may be slightly off. (But not off enough to change the overall point.)

Follow Shawn on twitter @collegehoopsnet. His next Bracketology projection will be posted tomorrow morning.

Poll: What Should the Most Important Selection Criteria Be?

Shawn Siegel — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:53:00 -0800