Saturday, March 10, 2012

D-1 BP68

24 hours from now we will be on Selection Sunday. The season goes so fast, doesn't it?

This will be my last bracket before my final bracket, which I'll put out about an hour prior to the Selection Show. The bubble is hard to figure out this year because there is such a wide range of bubble teams. It's probably some combination of parity and general randomness/weirdness. You want a team with a couple of wins over teams ranked in the Top Ten? Call Miami. You want a team that went 25-2 to finish the season and can excuse their early losses because of an injury? Call Drexel. You want a team that won a BCS conference outright? Call Washington. You want a team that added a key player midseason and has a better resume than the USC team last season that got a pass for early season losses before Jio Fontan became eligible? Call Tennessee. Want a good team from a smaller conference that lacks big wins but passes "the eye test"? Call Iona, Middle Tennessee or Oral Roberts. Want a team that went 12-6 in the Big East? Call South Florida. I can keep going...

The last few at-large spots are going to be difficult to figure out on Sunday, and they're hard to figure out now. I made three changes since my last bracket, dropping out Miami (Fl), Washington and Seton Hall, adding in Drexel, NC State and Arizona (as the Pac-12 auto bid).

Four teams were eliminated from at-large contention: Arkansas, LSU, Stanford and Wyoming. That leaves 18 teams not in my bracket that still have a chance at an at-large bid.

I'll have a bubble watch up in a few minutes as well.

The following are my typical disclaimers:

If I projected your favorite team below where you think it deserves to be, it's because I hate your favorite team. If I projected a team above where you think it deserves to be, it's because I secretly love them and have an incredibly blind bias in their favor.

On a more serious note, this is a projection of the final bracket on Selection Sunday, and not a listing of how I think teams would be seeded if the season ended now. There's a difference.

Here we go:

1. KENTUCKY (SEC)
1. Syracuse
1. OHIO STATE (BIG TEN)
1. Kansas

2. MISSOURI (BIG 12)
2. NORTH CAROLINA (ACC)
2. Michigan State
2. Duke

3. Wisconsin
3. Baylor
3. Marquette
3. Michigan

4. LOUISVILLE (BIG EAST)
4. Georgetown
4. Indiana
4. NEW MEXICO (MWC)

5. Notre Dame
5. ST. MARY'S (WCC)
5. San Diego State
5. MEMPHIS (CONFERENCE USA)

6. UNLV
6. Wichita State
6. Cincinnati
6. Temple

7. Florida
7. Florida State
7. Iowa State
7. MURRAY STATE (OVC)

8. Gonzaga
8. SAINT LOUIS (ATLANTIC TEN)
8. Purdue
8. Vanderbilt

9. CREIGHTON (MVC)
9. Kansas State
9. Alabama
9. BYU

10. Texas
10. UConn
10. HARVARD (IVY)
10. Virginia

11. California
11. Southern Miss
11. Colorado State
11. West Virginia

12. LONG BEACH STATE (BIG WEST)
12. NC State
12. ARIZONA (PAC-12)
12. Xavier
12. South Florida

13. Drexel
13. Northwestern
13. VCU (COLONIAL)
13. SOUTH DAKOTA STATE (SUMMIT)
13. BELMONT (ATLANTIC SUN)

14. DAVIDSON (SOUTHERN)
14. OHIO (MAC)
14. NEW MEXICO STATE (WAC)
14. MONTANA (BIG SKY)

15. LOYOLA-MARYLAND (MAAC)
15. DETROIT (HORIZON)
15. LAMAR (SOUTHLAND)
15. LIU (NEC)

16. LEHIGH (PATRIOT)
16. NORFOLK STATE (MEAC)
16. WESTERN KENTUCKY (SUN BELT)
16. UNC-ASHEVILLE (BIG SOUTH)
16. STONY BROOK (AMERICA EAST)
16. MISSISSIPPI VALLEY STATE (SWAC)

Teams seriously considered that just missed the cut:
Miami (Fl), Seton Hall, Oregon, Washington, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Oral Roberts, Middle Tennessee

Decent resumes, but not good enough:
Mississippi, Nevada

Long shots, but still in the at-large discussion:
Dayton, UMass, Marshall, Iona

Still alive, but pretty much need a miracle:
St. Joseph's, Central Florida, Akron, Colorado

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

if creighton ends up as a 9 seed, and OSU a 1...and theyre in the same bracket. i may be tempted to go upset in third round and pick creighton

DMoore said...

Two things (issues?) I want to raise. Throughout the year, you've held that the tournament selection is picking the best resumes, not the best teams. I think you've also commented that the selection committee gives greater weight to end of season results. I'm not sure those are correct, at least not this year.

Here's a link that touches on whether the best resumes, or the best teams, are being chosen:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/sports/ncaabasketball/rpi-may-belong-outside-the-ncaa-tournament-bubble.html

Sorry, I hope you can see NYTimes articles. The article is from one of the people (Nate Silver) who went through the annual mock selection committee process. He specifically raised this question with the directors of the tournament -- "were we supposed to be picking the best teams or the most deserving ones"?

"When I posed this question to David Worlock, the associate director for the men’s tournament, his answer was unambiguous: we were supposed to be picking the best teams. The committee members spoke frequently of the “shirts and skins test”: who would beat whom if they actually played a game?"

Similarly, I think they have made statements that they no longer give the last 10 games of the season additional weight. I don't have a link to that info though, and I expect that regardless of the official policy there, human nature will give some teams special consideration just because they won a few games in their conference tournaments, etc.

What are your thoughts?

Jeff said...

Well the thing is that if you talk to most mainstream sports analysts, they'll tell you that "best resumes"="best teams". There's no such thing as luck. Whoever is ranked #1 in the polls is the "best team" and if you have one of the ten best resumes then you're one of the ten best teams.

So that's why you constantly hear people in the media (as well as people on the Selection Committee being interviewed) saying that the Selection Committee picks the "37 best teams" and that they rate teams by "the eye test".

But they don't mean what they think they mean. I do my "How well did the computers project the field" every year now, and the Sagarin ELO_CHESS is always the closest predictor of seed, with the RPI also far better than Pomeroy or the Sagarin PREDICTOR. That means that the Selection Committee is picking the best resumes, not the best teams.

If they were picking "the best teams" then Memphis would be a 3 or 4 seed, and we all know that's not going to happen.

They do weight recent play over non-conference play, for sure. But they're still weighting recent wins and losses over recent play. If you lost to three Top Ten teams in overtime in the past two weeks, the Selection Committee won't give you any credit for that.

Anonymous said...

your seeding is flat out joke and you should be embarrassed

Jeff said...

Thank you for that constructive criticism. I'm just going to go out on a limb and assume that you're a Lehigh fan furious that I don't have them as a 15.