North Carolina Sports: Why Do We Have a Top Sixteen List?
The two name brand schools of North Carolina are both in the Committee’s first projections. Why do we have projections at this point?
The North Carolina Tar Heels (2 seed) and the Duke Blue Devils (4 seed) were both part of the first projected sweet sixteen of the year by the NCAA Tournament Committee. Of the sixteen teams, the ACC secured five spots with Virginia, Louisville, and Florida State checking into spots on the list.
Yet that is not the crux of this issue. Why is the NCAA Tournament Committee doing this? This weekly selection of picks may drive some television interests but it ultimately hurts the ability of the committee to make independent decisions. It sets forth of pattern that people assume means something while ultimately it is the last picks that matter and they may reflect nothing of the week before.
I had similar concerns with the College Football Playoff rankings, and indeed there were times where the committee had to rule against its previous findings in the last week. This was due to the outcomes of conference championships and the like. TCU and Baylor were out, Ohio State was in, because the ranking that said TCU and Baylor were 3 and 4 meant nothing in the first place.
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When the College Football Playoff adopted their system with its flaws, I figured that the committee would recognize the credibility threat eventually. That would, I hoped, drive them to replicate the Basketball model of Selection Sunday. In the old college basketball system, there was no real complaint to be made since the metrics were hidden from us. The college basketball tournament was also large, meaning that a Top 25 team would not be left out of the tournament field anyway.
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Instead the opposite has happened. The basketball people are trying to cash in like the football folks did. So now we get this ridiculous idea that teams have earned a top 4 seed and now could only lose it. People who track power rankings will undoubtedly ask what happened to one of these teams when it falls due to unforeseen issues. The answer is that the season was not over and it had not won anything yet.
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The other problem is that ultimately this is just a ratings grab. People will clue in, but their expectations will now have a basis. It becomes harder to explain how you rated a team differently when there is a record of your thinking leading up to that point. Selection Sunday becomes more difficult because you have to explain why your reasoning changed.
The good news is that they only release the top 16 teams. The NCAA field has 68 teams. Many of those slots are champions who are separate from the sorting process. That will at least cover their butts for the bubble teams at the end of the tournament field.