Bilas: Improving the NCAA tournament

[CyFan61]

That is some idiotic and inaccurate cherry-picking.

A 7-11 team being in would be extremely rare, and it would lead to less of what are now basically first round byes, while also giving more mid-majors a chance.

hardly cherry-picking. Every year there is a huge upset (usually multiple). I know Id find them much more interesting if they were 15 seed Florida Gulf Coast making it to the Sweet 16 instead of 15 seed TCU because we made the tournament only the power conferences and the Big 12 got 9 teams in.

 

[FDWxMan]

it would solve the dilemma of smaller conference regular seasons not meaning a lot. Most of those teams would be mid-major teams.

I like the idea...could probably pull it off without going all the way to 96 if people thought it too big. Most years 72-76 would probably cover any bid thievery.

 

[HFCS]

Side convo: I know I give you a lot of crap about RPI, but check this out and see what you think. Probably way to fancy to be accepted by the committee, but it is the spirit of the direction I want an RPI tweak/replacement to head (Sagarin ELO-ish is the short version). https://sethburn.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/bad-wins-good-losses-every-game-counts-220-kp-elo-update/

**Also note the rankings in that article are from Feb 20, so they're WAY out of date.

RPI is obviously flawed, teams like VCU and KU are clearly overrated most of the year...but it still makes more sense as a seeding tool than BPI or something like KenPom. Sagarin ELO is the best well known metric out there that would possibly be accepted and used by the NCAA.

In terms of just rating overall quality of a team I like Sagarin full ranking, in terms of selecting teams based on purely who they have beat and lost to, ELO would be great...drastically better than BPI. BPI getting run as a selection tool just shows how ESPN truly runs college sports.

BPI has had Ohio State idiotic all year. RPI has had KU and VCU high all year. In comparison sagarin ELO has them just exactly where you'd think. Sure some teams are still 5 spots or so from where you'd think, but it's a who beat who and there aren't gigantic whopping anomalies.

 

[cdface]

yeah, the BPI really sucks when it doesn't make sense. look who was No. 1 in the BPI ranking on Jan 7, 2014

 

[Cyclonetrombone]

Basketball is the main reason why I am against the whole Power Five autonomy... I know it isn't about basketball but the Pac 12 and SEC are NOT power conferences in basketball. It would be interesting if a Power Five NCAA tournament is still 64 teams though which would include every single team in a powerfive conference. Season is played for seating everyone goes, would be weird to see some crap team making some sort of a run in that situation lol

 

[Cyclonestate78]

Not sure if conferences get to decide who gets the auto bid, but RE the Ivy League that's the whole point; they smartly (imo) send their best team every year.

Their results are generally better then most other low level mid-major conferences.

Total NCAA Tourney Wins All-time...

Ivy League - 42
America East - 5
Big Sky - 10
Big South - 6
Big West - 14
Colonial Athletic - 29
Horizon - 21
MAAC - 15
MAC - 30
MEAC - 3
NEC - 3
OVC - 10
Patriot - 18
SOCON - 13
Southland - 9
Summit - 4
Sun Belt - 20
SWAC - 4
WAC - 18

 

[cyclones500]

I don't really get why low major conferences send their conf tourney champ to the ncaa tourney. You think they would want to send their best team to represent the league, like the Ivy League does.

It'd be more fair to regular-season champion, but most leagues must figure it's a good trade-off — with conference tournament a league is guaranteed a prime-time feature TV slot -- if it's regular-season winner auto-bid, it would go largely unnoticed in most cases (unless it so happened to come down to a final game, such as this year's Ivy playoff).

I don't think the general basketball fan would like the process as much, either, if small conferences chose regular-season winner as auto-bid.

 

[cyclones500]

That was my issue with it as well. Teams that find out on Selection Sunday part 1 that they are ranked at a certain point would now have zero incentive to try hard in the conference tourneys because they wouldn't be able to improve their seeding. It would have the opposite of Bilas' intended goal: placing more importance on conference tourney week. They'd just become even more of an afterthought for the big conferences.

And in a worst case scenario, can you imagine all the conspiracy theories that would run wild the first time a power conference team that was right on the line of getting bumped by auto-bids unexpectedly won their conference tourney?

I didn't have time to re-read his column and study it further yet, I wondered if I interpreted correctly, that the 1-68 ranking would be firm entering conference tournaments? Or can teams still gain or drop in the rank? If they're locked, I agree with the points you noted. If the order can change between then and Selection Sunday, that may be different.