I’m very interested to get your thoughts on the tournament selection process. My question to you would be what would your list be in order of importance for getting an at large and better seed? I’ll start with my list:

1- Win, You have to win games.
2- Quality road wins
3- Quality neutral wins
4- Quality OOC wins
5- limited bad losses
6- beating teams by more than the margin you were expected to win.

Things that don’t mean as much as I thought they did:

1- Net
2- winning your regular season league championship outright.
3- winning close games at home against high net teams.


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The Net is attached to a lot of the things you listed as important.

FeartheFro wrote: ↑

March 18th, 2024, 9:56 am

I’m very interested to get your thoughts on the tournament selection process. My question to you would be what would your list be in order of importance for getting an at large and better seed? I’ll start with my list:

1- Win, You have to win games.
2- Quality road wins
3- Quality neutral wins
4- Quality OOC wins
5- limited bad losses
6- beating teams by more than the margin you were expected to win.

Things that don’t mean as much as I thought they did:

1- Net
2- winning your regular season league championship outright.
3- winning close games at home against high net teams.


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All that matters to the committee is the information that fits into their bias.

They claim the MW was penalized due to OOC scheduling but they didn’t penalize the BIG 12 for it.

Your conference. There is a reason Virginia made it in over St. John’s and Indiana State.

The Big East isn’t threatening to blow up the NCAA and do their own thing.

Full wrote: ↑

March 18th, 2024, 10:15 am

Your conference. There is a reason Virginia made it in over St. John’s and Indiana State.

The Big East isn’t threatening to blow up the NCAA and do their own thing.

This^^^

And what you've done in previous tournaments matters. They could've just as easily screwed Gonzaga and SDSU for conference affiliation.

I know we feel we were treated unfairly as a conference (myself included), but at the end of the day we did get 6 teams in. Never thought I would see that happen. Now let’s not (I can't express myself without swearing) the bed as a conference and put more pressure on the committee next year.


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What matters most?

That’s easy. Being in a P6 conference


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Do I think the Aggies and the MWC got screwed on their seedings? Absolutely. But at the end of the day do you know who is the best at placing teams where they should be seeded in the grand pecking order of things?

The NCAA Committee? Nope.
TeamRankngs? Nope
Lunardi? Nope
Ken Pom? Nope
The NET? Nope
Bracket matrix? Nope

The correct answer is the Las Vegas betting houses. And they, regardless of our higher seeding, have installed the Aggies as a 3-1/2 point underdog to TCU. But I believe we can and will win the game. Beating Purdue is an entirely different matter.

I hope we do beat TCU. And not just because I think the basketball gods owe me big time after witnessing the Aggies win only one NCAA/NIT game in the 52 years I have ardently followed them but because this team has earned it. It is an amalgamation of misfits that no one believed could be successful and yet they came together and won USU’s first outright conference basketball championship. I don’t think these players are satisfied with that accomplishment alone. Let’s get ‘er done!

The hats-in-the-mall theory of the universe remains undefeated

FeartheFro wrote: ↑

March 18th, 2024, 9:56 am

I’m very interested to get your thoughts on the tournament selection process. My question to you would be what would your list be in order of importance for getting an at large and better seed? I’ll start with my list:

1- Win, You have to win games.
2- Quality road wins
3- Quality neutral wins
4- Quality OOC wins
5- limited bad losses
6- beating teams by more than the margin you were expected to win.

Things that don’t mean as much as I thought they did:

1- Net
2- winning your regular season league championship outright.
3- winning close games at home against high net teams.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

As I have said before, the most important thing by far is who you beat and where you beat them. The committee wants to see that you can beat other tournament-quality teams, particularly away from home. As I prepared my bracket, I ended up moving USU down to a 7 seed because BSU was the only tournament-quality team we beat away from Logan. Winning more games is obviously a good thing, but lots of wins don't guarantee anything. (See Indiana State. Or USU in 2004, for that matter.) And RUTS will help the NET, but the NET, as you correctly noted, is a secondary factor when selecting/seeding teams.

Bad losses definitely hurt you, but how much seems to depend on the idiosyncrasies of the committee. Last year Rutgers missed the tournament despite having far and away the best quality wins of any bubble team. Most likely that was because they also had the most WTF losses of any bubble team. This year, however, the committee didn't seem to punish FAU and Texas A&M hardly at all for a number of questionable losses. (I incorrectly predicted that A&M would miss the tournament because their resume reminded me too much of Rutgers' resume last year.)

And my understanding is that the committee will consider conference standings, but usually only as a tie breaker against teams with similar resumes. If a team that is lower in the conference standings has a better set of quality wins than a team higher in the conference standings, it is common to give a better seed (or an at large bid) to the lower ranked team.

Dwigt wrote: ↑

March 18th, 2024, 10:10 am

All that matters to the committee is the information that fits into their bias.

They claim the MW was penalized due to OOC scheduling but they didn’t penalize the BIG 12 for it.

I do think that there was some bias, but I think this is going too far. The committee didn't complain about the MWC's OOC scheduling per se. What they said was that almost all of the MWC's quality wins were against each other, which made their resumes difficult to evaluate. And there is some truth to that claim. I just feel like they didn't apply that standard consistently. You could have said the same thing about the WCC, but both WCC teams got 5 seeds. And the Big 12 basically had zero quality OOC wins by teams other than Houston, Kansas, and Baylor. I feel like they had decided that the MWC was overrated and made up a justification to reduce their seeds after the fact.

But let's put it in perspective. The MWC still got six bids. The Big East, widely regarded as the second strongest conference, got three. And three of the four "last four out" were P6 teams. The committee has always said that seeding is much more subjective than picking at large teams, because you can play your way out of a bad seed. And all six MWC teams that deserved bids got bids. So while I don't think they seeded the MWC fairly, I also don't think that it's fair to say that conference affiliation or "hats in the mall" matters more than quality wins or the stated criteria that the committee uses. At the end of the day, six MWC teams NCAA-worthy resumes, and all six of them got NCAA bids, which is what was supposed to happen.

isrred wrote: ↑

March 18th, 2024, 12:48 pm

The hats-in-the-mall theory of the universe remains undefeated

This guy gets it

isrred wrote: ↑

March 18th, 2024, 12:48 pm

The hats-in-the-mall theory of the universe remains undefeated

Instead of strong OOC schedule they should just come out and say it. Play power conference schools. Simple as that.

Usu0505 wrote: ↑

March 19th, 2024, 11:29 am

isrred wrote: ↑

March 18th, 2024, 12:48 pm

The hats-in-the-mall theory of the universe remains undefeated

Instead of strong OOC schedule they should just come out and say it. Play power conference schools. Simple as that.

No. Almost all of the MWC's marquee OOC wins were against P6 teams. Indeed, if beating P6 teams were the only criteria, the MWC had multiple wins against non-tournament P6 teams like Stanford, Georgia Tech, Boston College, and Washington (who lost to the MWC 3 times). The issue was that the MWC had very few OOC wins against tournament-quality teams, which is a fair criticism. My beef is that they didn't apply this standard consistently, as evidence by the high seeds given to the WCC and the Big 12.

But it's like I said, the MWC still got six bids. And you can play your way out of a bad seed. And there is minimal difference in the difficulty of a first round matchup for a seed anywhere between 6 and 11. Your matchup won't get significantly easier unless you get to a 5 seed or better, and even the most optimistic MWC seed projections generally didn't have the MWC schools that high. I hope our teams use the bogus seeding as motivation, but the harm to the conference is minimal. It might actually get the conference additional money since play-in game wins give the conference a full revenue share. So I don't think it is worth getting outraged about.