Figuring Out My Bracket
Let me start by saying that March Madness is my favorite sporting event of the year. Like many other sports fans, that first weekend is filled with making last minute changes to office pools and sitting in front of the TV for four days with friends. Most of all, I like the system of having the 65 best teams in college basketball fight for the death for three straight weekends. It’s the best postseason format imaginable. That being said, I have some comments about the field, the seedings and the pairings that I thought I’d get off my chest.
- KANSAS
I’ll get to the most obvious mistake by the committee first and that is the placement of #1 overall seed Kansas in the loaded Midwest region. In order to prevent redundancies, I’m going to quote Gary Parish from CBSSports.com:
Kansas spent four months assembling the nation’s best body of work, and for that Bill Self was rewarded with a region featuring the CBSSports.com National Player of the Year (Ohio State’s Evan Turner), three prospects expected to go in the top 10 of June’s NBA Draft (Turner, Georgia Tech’s Derrick Favors, and Georgetown’s Greg Monroe), eight other conference tournament champions (Ohio State, San Diego State, Northern Iowa, New Mexico State, Houston, Ohio, UC Santa Barbara, Lehigh), seven other Final Four coaches (UNLV’s Lon Kruger, Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, Maryland’s Gary Williams, San Diego State’s Steve Fischer, Georgetown’s John Thompson III, Georgia Tech’s Paul Hewitt and Ohio State’s Thad Matta), and five teams that own wins over top seeds (Tennessee beat Kentucky and Kansas, Georgetown beat Duke and Syracuse, Georgia Tech beat Duke, Maryland beat Duke, and Oklahoma State beat Kansas). Seriously, only two schools beat KU this season, and the committee stuck both of those schools with KU in the Midwest. So congrats on the overall No. 1, Jayhawks. And good luck trying to navigate through what is clearly the most difficult region
To make matters worse, this loaded region certainly dilutes the three remaining regions to a certain extent, notably the Duke-led South region, which we’ll get to next. My take on this is that if you’re going to tell the world that Kansas is the overall seed, don’t put them in a region that suggests otherwise. Personally, I don’t see why this information is made public. By just releasing the seedings and not the ranking of the seeds, it makes all the #1 seeds and all the #2 seeds equal, etc. and we don’t have the problem with breaking down the brackets like this.
As stated before, I feel that Duke, the tournament’s third best #1 seed, somehow made out the best with their comparably weak region. The #2 seed Villanova comes into the tournament having lost 6 of its last 11 games. The #4 seed Purdue has been in freefall since the loss of #2 scorer Robbie Hummel. The #6 seed Notre Dame has disappointed all season and should be seeded lower. I’m not going to even get into how Duke at the last second jumped from a borderline #1 seed to the third best #1 seed by winning the weaker than normal ACC Tournament. This might just be one of those cases where the NCAA Tournament Committee just said, “Look guys, it’s Duke. Let’s make them happy.”
- #2 SEEDS
We know that the #1 seeds rank as follows: Kansas, Kentucky, Duke, Syracuse. If you were to rank the #2 seeds, most logical thinkers would say West Virginia, Ohio St., Kansas State, Villanova. Therefore, by looking at the pairings in the typical best vs. worst fashion, the pairings in each region should be Kansas-Villanova, Kentucky-Kansas State, Duke-Ohio St., Syracuse-West Virginia. Instead, we’re left with Kansas being stuck with a very strong Ohio St. team, Kentucky being paired with a West Virginia team that arguably got robbed of a #1 seed, and Duke gets paired with struggling Villanova. Now I’m not a college basketball analyst by any means. In fact, I’ve hardly watched college basketball during this regular season. That being said, if I can just throw those pairings together that quickly then how could a committee of distinguished basketball minds botch up the pairings the way they did?
ETA….After doing a little more research, it seems as if the Selection Committee is justifying putting West Virgina with Kentucky based on location (WV gets to play in Buffalo, which is about 300 miles from home). I find this a ridiculous way to justify having them play in the same region as Kentucky.
- TAKING AWAY OUR CINDERELLAS
My favorite part of March Madness is watching those Cinderella teams from small schools overtake major conference teams. To me, it’s what the tournament is really all about and what the selection committee should be trying to promote. However, the pairings of the 7-10 and 8-9 matchups this year take away from the fun of rooting for the underdogs. Two of the 8-9 games look like this: UNLV-Northern Iowa and Texas-Wake Forest. Why is UNLV playing Northern Iowa? Both teams are talented small conference schools who enter the tournament looking to prove themselves on a big stage against major conference teams. On the other hand, is anyone exited about Texas and Wake Forest, two of the weaker teams during the second half of the season, losing a combined 8 of their last 12 games? To me, shuffling those four teams would promote the spirit of the tournament and make things a whole lot more exiting for everyone. The same could be said of the 7-10 matchups in Oklahoma St.-Georgia Tech and Richmond-St. Mary’s. Ok. St.-Ga. Tech looks a lot more like a 2nd round matchup and instead of one of those teams losing to the other, wouldn’t it be better to present potential Cinderella stories by pairing them with Richmond or St. Mary’s? Of all the current trends in the tournament selecting process, this particular one is the most unsettling to me.
- TEAMS LEFT OUT
As always, we have a few teams that should be in the tournament and a few that should not. Mississippi State, Illinois and Virginia Tech are the most notable snubs. Virginia Tech went 23-8 during the regular season, a respectable record for a team left out of the tournament and the most wins in school history. However, the Hokies’ strength of schedule was last out of any major conference team, coming in at 339 nationally. Illinois made a strong run through the Big 10 Tournament this past weekend, but in the end the 19-14 record did not settle well with the selection committee. Mississippi State also finished with 23 wins, including strong tournament victories against tournament teams Florida and Vanderbilt. However, a last second loss to #1 seed Kentucky in the championship game denied them an automatic bid. Again, like Virginia Tech, the committee focused heavily on Mississippi State’s weak out of conference schedule (12 of their 15 non-conference games were against teams with RPI below 110 and four losses were to teams with RPI below 100). Personally, I thought Mississippi State’s run through the tournament should have been enough to propel them in over 21-12 Florida (who they just beat a few days ago). I also think Virginia Tech deserved to go over a disappointing 19-10 Wake Forest team. However, I think the moral of this story is that despite the fact that the committee is never going to please everyone, the criteria by which the committee chooses these teams seems to vary from year to year. Does the committee prefer teams who finish strong and make a run through their conference tournaments or do they want teams who schedule tough early season matchups? I don’t think there is any written basis to their voting that has any kind of consistency and that is my main gripe about the whole process.
