So, the 68 teams were finally selected yesterday for the NCAA Division 1 Men's Basketball Tournament. As usual, there were teams selected as at-large picks which people did not agree with. Some schools with terrific records were left out. First of all, it's not a perfect process. After the 31 conference tournament winners are put in as automatic qualifiers, there are 37 spots left for selection bids. These picks are the big topic of conversation between fans, players, coaches, and media.
There are trends within the teams who qualified by winning their conference or were chosen by a ten member selection committee. More than half of the 37 at-large teams come from the six BCS football conferences. There is a strange thing about this designation. First, most basketball broadcasters and some writers do not use the words "BCS" to describe those leagues. They are referred to as "power" or "major" conferences. The Big Ten, Big East, ACC, SEC, Big 12, and Pac-12 make up those six. The BCS conferences collected 26 of the 37 non-automatic bids. The other 25 conferences picked up 11, this is actually a huge improvement from four in 2009. If you watch college basketball, you know there are a lot of good teams outside the BCS leagues.
For instance, the Colonial Athletic Association had two at-large NCAA teams make the Final Four in the last six seasons, George Mason in 2006 and VCU in 2011. The Butler Bulldogs, Horizon League tournament champions in 2010 and 2011, made the national championship game in those back-to-back years. The Memphis Tigers from Conference USA advanced to the title game in 2008 before losing a close game in overtime to Kansas from the Big 12. Unfortunately, the CAA and Horizon League get only its tournament champion in most years. Conference USA is a little more respected, especially this year, if you include all the teams the big, bad Big East took away in 2004-05.
The Big East has nine teams in this year's 68 team field, 8 if you exclude Louisville as conference tournament champion. Four of those schools (Louisville, Cincinnati, Marquette, and South Florida) used to play in former Conference USA. There are 16 members in the conference, that's more than the ones in the NBA and NHL. Those two professional winter sports divide their 30 teams into two 15-team East and West conferences. There are NBA and NHL teams as far east as Massachusetts and west as California. The Big East's geographic locations stretch east-to-west only from Rhode Island, near Massachusetts, to Illinois. That's a big difference.
It was nice to see the Pac-12 get only 1 at-large selection besides their tourney champ Colorado. The University of Washington, located in Seattle, won the regular-season standings championship but did not get picked. That was a good move by the committee for once. Washington was a bad team which finished, 14 wins and four losses, first in the worst conference known to man. Okay, not that bad but the Huskies were only 7-6 against non Pac-12 teams. According to Eamonn Brennan of ESPN, the Pac-12 had one win and 29 losses versus teams outside their conference and ranked in the top 50 in the RPI index. They were awful facing good teams. There is one question, how did California get picked? Is there a rule saying the NCAA must choose one non-automatic from each BCS conference?
There are other teams with great stats. Stewart Mandel of Sports Illustrated wrote via Twitter that Marshall had four victories over teams with a 50 or lower RPI rating. Basically, it means the lesser the RPI, the better the team. Think about it, the Pac-12 as a twelve team conference had one win over a top 50 non-conference team while Marshall's Thundering Herd from Conference USA had two in both non-conference and conference play. They played at Syracuse of the Big East, number one in the RPI rankings, and lost by only six points, 62-56.
CBS Sports.com gives a breakdown of a team's wins and losses with the opponent's RPI rating alongside. According to the report, nine of Marshall's thirteen losses came against teams calculated 60 or higher. Six of Marshall's twenty wins were over top-60 rated teams. That's better than some at-large teams who were selected (California from Pac-12, South Florida from Big East, Virginia from ACC) for the NCAA Tournament.
The only good thing about Division 1's basketball championship is it's a 68-team playoff. In football, The FBS or Football Bowl Subdivision, uses the BCS or Bowl Championship Series. The BCS is a ten-team format featuring a two-team playoff with eight teams playing exhibition contests known as bowl games. It could be worse.
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