At the NCAA Convention in Atlanta yesterday, the NCAA opened up a mock selection process to all attendees and streamed the event live over the internet.
The purpose of the exercise was to present to everyone the Principles and Procedures of the Bracket Selection and then walk everyone through the implementation of those procedures to create a mock bracket based on the data from the 2009-10 season as it currently stood.
During the process, the NCAA stressed certain issues that either had changed for this season or had been frequently asked questions by observers. Some of these weren’t particularly novel (the selection committee doesn’t consider historically relevant subplots, TV ratings or ticket sales in crafting the bracket), but others had important implications for mid-major conferences.
The NCAA will no longer be including the record in the last 12 games on the team sheets and will implicitly be increasing the focus on the season as a whole. This is important for teams from mid-major conferences, which tend to rack up most of their quality wins before the new year and have few resume building victories in those final 12 contests.
Another important rule change for the mid-majors is the exclusion of conference RPI from the team sheets as well. This should alleviate some of the double-counting concerns of teams from power conferences getting a boost in RPI from playing a tough conference schedule and then also getting a boost in consideration from playing in a higher RPI league. Playing in a higher RPI league is already reflected in a team’s RPI, so there really is no need to add any more value for that. And there’s no need to penalize a team for playing in a lower RPI league, since that will be reflected in a lower RPI and fewer quality wins.
The impact of these changes could clearly be seen in the final outcome. The 10, 11 and 12 lines were littered with non-BCS teams such as William and Mary, San Diego State, UNLV, Richmond, Northern Iowa, Western Kentucky, Illinois State, Siena and most importantly for Ivy fans, both Harvard and Cornell. The Crimson checked in on the No. 11 line, while Cornell nabbed a No. 12 seed.
There are too many moving parts to the profiles of each team to consider this any sort of potential representation of how things could look in two months, but there are a few things that can be gleaned from this mock exercise.
– Wins over at-large caliber teams are incredibly important. Cornell and Harvard have incredibly similar profiles, except that the Crimson’s best win is over a tournament team, William and Mary, whereas the best teams over which the Big Red triumphed, at Alabama and at St. John’s, did not. Both the Crimson Tide and the Red Storm have shown the capability to play at that level this season and could put together a good enough conference run to make the tournament.
– Road/neutral wins are incredibly important as well. The bubble teams were mostly mid-majors not high-majors, because at this point in the year most high-majors have hardly, if ever, taken to the road. Each of Cornell and Harvard have solid road showings to fall back on (Cornell’s aforementioned two plus Drexel and LaSalle and a close loss at Kansas, while Harvard has wins at BC and BU and a close loss at Connecticut). This will begin to tilt back in the high-majors’ favor as conference play continues.
– If at least one of Cornell and Harvard takes care of business in Ivy play, the league should have at least one representative on a seed line (10, 11 or 12) where it could do some damage. The last time an Ivy team has been seeded 12 or above was 2003, when Penn was given a No. 11 seed for the second consecutive year and lost 77-63 to No. 6 Oklahoma State. Since then, the Ivies have been a No. 14 four times, and a No. 13 and No. 15 once each.
