again its one year and every year is somewhat different. There are some takeaways but also some things that need to be printed out and saved as it seems like twitter has given every amateur the right to bloviate about metrics, efficiency and what the committee actually values.
Rutgers got in with a bad net of 77 which is the worst in history. No it doesn't mean the net doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but it does confirm that if a school has significant wins or a solid resume besides the NET ranking, the school will be selected. See Arizona State, St Johns, Michigan State in recent years with NETs in the 65-75 range.
Quality wins matter the most. Quad one wins matter alot. Wins vs the field really help a school. RU was 8-5. That a big time number. Very very hard to leave off and it was stunning to watch the metrics driven guys look at the number and just dismiss the wins out of hand. Some really bad takes on the Rutgers resume. RU was listed on just 1/3 of the brackets on the Matrix in the end and much of the commentary from them were focused solely on their losses and metrics and not wins. My number one tool in bracketology is wins vs the field. Q1 and 2 record is important but you have to dig deeper. I believe Wyoming was 11-6 in Q1/2 but still in first 4 games. All those wins are not the same. RU had high level Q1 wins as opposed to beating a bunch of 500 WCC/MWC schools. Wyoming only had 2 wins vs the field and thats why despite a gaudy record fell precipitously every week in bracketology from a projected 8 seed to last 4 in.
Quality wins matter more than bad losses. See Rutgers and then see surprising Dayton which came out of left field to be the last team out. Dayton had wins over Kansas, Miami and Va Tech. In league beat Davidson and Richmond. 5 wins vs the field. 5-0. They have 4 horrific losses, 3 in just one week to Lipscomb, Austin Peay, Umass Lowell, the other was La Salle. Those are hideous losses. Yet incredible out of conference wins for a high mid major. Rutgers overcame bad losses to Umass and Lafayette but had 8 wins vs the field.
The selection committee has an affinity for the Atlantic 10. Dayton just missing was twofold...it was the wins but it was also that the committee almost always is searching for that 2nd A10 team. I see it every year. I hate it because I think that having the Commish from the A10 on the committee has biased it a bit. Sometimes they seem to get a little bit of benefit of the doubt. I am glad a school like VCU lost and was nowhere near getting in because the metric and efficiency guys were pumping up a blank resume simply because their computer ratings were high
They say conference record and finish does not matter but it clearly did with Notre Dame, 15-5 2nd place in the ACC. Inexplicably got in over Texas A&M (more on them later) with just a pedestrian 4-9 mark in Q1/2 and 4 wins vs the field and one of those was late addition Corpus Christi. They had a high end win over Kentucky sure but the other wins were just Miami and UNC. UNC AD on committee putting his thumb on things. I am sort of torn. I realize the ACC was down but IMO I do think conference record should be considered...look at RU...12-8. I think finishing 15-5 in the ACC does show they did not screw up too much against the weaker schools.
Conference tournaments mean less than we thought. Even I always fall into that trap. Tourneys are just one to three games during a season. It is body of work. It is hard to go from fringes of the bubble to into the field. We see it with Va Tech and Texas A&M. Va Tech did get in by winning the ACC AQ but if they had lost in the finals, they were not getting in. That seed of 11 and placement on the seedlist behind RU says it all. Texas A&M amassed two big quality wins and a nice won over bubble Florida but still didnt make it. At the end of the day A&M was too far back off the bubble. The committee looks like they had done alot of work heading into the final few days and had an idea of who they were putting in the field and the Aggies were not on the radar screen. Even with the wins they got, they still were a wobbly 4-10 vs Q1...do not get caught up in recency bias, body of work. That is not a good number at all. While they were 5-9 vs field, 6-9 if adding Corpus Christi, its okay but not overwhelming. They had some Q2 losses and their OOC sos was 257 whereas Notre Dame was 26. Those comparisons are important are the very end. I do feel that A&M probably deserved it over Notre Dame...and geez they beat them head to head but thats another thing we learned. Head to head really does not matter for selection or for seeding.
Sunday results mean almost nothing because the field is already set and besides a contingency bracket for a bid stealer the seeds are basically set. Iowa winning the Big 10 played no role as they were a 5 whether they won the tourney but in reality that should have immediately bumped them to a 4. Alot of talk about Tennessee not being a 2 seed, well dont expect a change on that day. Tennessee was also beating a team they didnt have in the field. Beating A&M wasnt going to push them up a seed.
Duke still gets favoritism. So on the other end of the argument, Duke really hasnt looked good in a weak conference even though they dominated the regular season. Losing to a team in the final who wasnt going to get in the field otherwise not a good look. Besides Tennessee one could argue Purdue over Duke as the last 2 too. UNC still gets favoritism. 8 seed which I got right because I knew they would the committee would overseed them. 3 wins vs tourney teams...alot of Q3 wins, if they didnt beat Duke they still would have got in with very little quality wins.
Big 10 also getting alot of favoritism. 9 schools out of 14 in. I mean agree with it but its alot. One can argue about spreading the wealth but with the ACC and Pac 12 being garbage this year. The Big 10 benefits from that.
Non conference wins matter alot...especially high end wins. Alabama just 19-13 and 9-9 in SEC play had a slew of high end wins. Notre Dame's win over Kentucky was a game changer. Non conference activity is a big factor in determining how your NET is going to end up and how your conference is going to do in the NET. That really helped the SEC and Mountain West out and you see it represented in their strong numbers. And while the NET isnt all that important its going to be important if you are a power 6 school and you have both a great net and great wins. In Iowas case they had a great net without the great wins. PS yes RU got but yes they need to schedule stronger OOC
15 losses is a bridge too far. See Oklahoma. Only one school ever with that many losses. You have to be extraordinary to get in. Oklahoma wasnt...they were just 4-12 vs the field. Perhaps if they beat Texas Tech and made the Big 12 final, 19-15 would be a new test for the committee but that did not happen. Michigan at 17-14 was just 3 above 500 which means they became the 5th school to make it in a non covid year less than 4 games above 500. If they were 17-15 they were not getting in. Record matters but its a tightrope walk. Michgan was also 7-12 vs the field. Better stuff than Oklahoma. You do see that schools with bulky loss totals like Michigan and RU will be put into the field if they have a significant amount of quality wins...
A big blow to metrics guys like Norlander, Parrish, Warriner, and the younger bracketologists. Efficiency and Predictive ratings are not how the field is selected. Many suspected this and it was confirmed. Old school wins out. The Kenpom, bpi, blah blah blah appear on the team sheet as numbers, nothing more. The committee is given no instruction to even consider them. If number looks out of whack or numbers in RU's case, the committee is going to see they are outliers given the meat of the resume. Personally when I evaluate, I do not even look at any of the 5-6 numbers like sor, bpi, kenpom, totally ignore them. The NET I do pay attention to but not until I have made my full evaluation. The committee knows full well stuff like Houston at 3, San Fran at 22, Va Tech at 27 , Rutgers at 77 does not fool anyone. What your resume says rather than the number matters more. I never want to see KenPom on the this board or his partner Bart Torvik...they are literally meaningless especially stuff like wins above the bubble..what does that even mean...someone please explain. its literally useless and so is Bart.
Bracketology should not begin in December and heat up in January. Bracketology should start in February and heat up by the end of the month. Alot of worthless brackets in January. Xavier was a projected 4 seed in January. Wake Forest was being talked about as a lock for 6 weeks. Both schools were talked about as locks even 2 weeks. Wyoming was a lock for weeks. Things can change in a hurry once the resumes are actually looked at rather than looking at a number or efficiency ratings. It was funny to watch how these schools dropped day after day and the big adjustments made.
Bracketologists have big egos including me. No one wants to be wrong. We all are. I need to do a better job on seeding, some of that is I have to get more in tune with how the committee sees things and not how I see things. Much to clean up there. Bracketologists are always learning.
Joe Lunardi is such a polarizing figure but I like him. He was the first. He is generally good at what he does. He knows his stuff. He is more consistent than most and he is old school. Jerry Palm is the worst guy that CBS can have. He is awkward not photogenic. In some ways I do like having a geek up there and it seems to be embracing his role as the Village Idiot but CBS is covering the NCAA tourney they should have a guy that give it to you straight. His bracketing the final week was awful. He was putting BYU in the field, like the only one on the matrix to do so. He was keeping Michigan, Indiana and RU out and then suddenly putting the former 2 in even though no one played. Yes we all scrub the field, but Jerry knew better, he knew what he was doing and he knew he was going to move at least one if not two Big 10 schools in. Historical data matters until it does not. Jerry knows this and will go with the odds over rational discussion about Rutgers.
Rutgers got in with a bad net of 77 which is the worst in history. No it doesn't mean the net doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but it does confirm that if a school has significant wins or a solid resume besides the NET ranking, the school will be selected. See Arizona State, St Johns, Michigan State in recent years with NETs in the 65-75 range.
Quality wins matter the most. Quad one wins matter alot. Wins vs the field really help a school. RU was 8-5. That a big time number. Very very hard to leave off and it was stunning to watch the metrics driven guys look at the number and just dismiss the wins out of hand. Some really bad takes on the Rutgers resume. RU was listed on just 1/3 of the brackets on the Matrix in the end and much of the commentary from them were focused solely on their losses and metrics and not wins. My number one tool in bracketology is wins vs the field. Q1 and 2 record is important but you have to dig deeper. I believe Wyoming was 11-6 in Q1/2 but still in first 4 games. All those wins are not the same. RU had high level Q1 wins as opposed to beating a bunch of 500 WCC/MWC schools. Wyoming only had 2 wins vs the field and thats why despite a gaudy record fell precipitously every week in bracketology from a projected 8 seed to last 4 in.
Quality wins matter more than bad losses. See Rutgers and then see surprising Dayton which came out of left field to be the last team out. Dayton had wins over Kansas, Miami and Va Tech. In league beat Davidson and Richmond. 5 wins vs the field. 5-0. They have 4 horrific losses, 3 in just one week to Lipscomb, Austin Peay, Umass Lowell, the other was La Salle. Those are hideous losses. Yet incredible out of conference wins for a high mid major. Rutgers overcame bad losses to Umass and Lafayette but had 8 wins vs the field.
The selection committee has an affinity for the Atlantic 10. Dayton just missing was twofold...it was the wins but it was also that the committee almost always is searching for that 2nd A10 team. I see it every year. I hate it because I think that having the Commish from the A10 on the committee has biased it a bit. Sometimes they seem to get a little bit of benefit of the doubt. I am glad a school like VCU lost and was nowhere near getting in because the metric and efficiency guys were pumping up a blank resume simply because their computer ratings were high
They say conference record and finish does not matter but it clearly did with Notre Dame, 15-5 2nd place in the ACC. Inexplicably got in over Texas A&M (more on them later) with just a pedestrian 4-9 mark in Q1/2 and 4 wins vs the field and one of those was late addition Corpus Christi. They had a high end win over Kentucky sure but the other wins were just Miami and UNC. UNC AD on committee putting his thumb on things. I am sort of torn. I realize the ACC was down but IMO I do think conference record should be considered...look at RU...12-8. I think finishing 15-5 in the ACC does show they did not screw up too much against the weaker schools.
Conference tournaments mean less than we thought. Even I always fall into that trap. Tourneys are just one to three games during a season. It is body of work. It is hard to go from fringes of the bubble to into the field. We see it with Va Tech and Texas A&M. Va Tech did get in by winning the ACC AQ but if they had lost in the finals, they were not getting in. That seed of 11 and placement on the seedlist behind RU says it all. Texas A&M amassed two big quality wins and a nice won over bubble Florida but still didnt make it. At the end of the day A&M was too far back off the bubble. The committee looks like they had done alot of work heading into the final few days and had an idea of who they were putting in the field and the Aggies were not on the radar screen. Even with the wins they got, they still were a wobbly 4-10 vs Q1...do not get caught up in recency bias, body of work. That is not a good number at all. While they were 5-9 vs field, 6-9 if adding Corpus Christi, its okay but not overwhelming. They had some Q2 losses and their OOC sos was 257 whereas Notre Dame was 26. Those comparisons are important are the very end. I do feel that A&M probably deserved it over Notre Dame...and geez they beat them head to head but thats another thing we learned. Head to head really does not matter for selection or for seeding.
Sunday results mean almost nothing because the field is already set and besides a contingency bracket for a bid stealer the seeds are basically set. Iowa winning the Big 10 played no role as they were a 5 whether they won the tourney but in reality that should have immediately bumped them to a 4. Alot of talk about Tennessee not being a 2 seed, well dont expect a change on that day. Tennessee was also beating a team they didnt have in the field. Beating A&M wasnt going to push them up a seed.
Duke still gets favoritism. So on the other end of the argument, Duke really hasnt looked good in a weak conference even though they dominated the regular season. Losing to a team in the final who wasnt going to get in the field otherwise not a good look. Besides Tennessee one could argue Purdue over Duke as the last 2 too. UNC still gets favoritism. 8 seed which I got right because I knew they would the committee would overseed them. 3 wins vs tourney teams...alot of Q3 wins, if they didnt beat Duke they still would have got in with very little quality wins.
Big 10 also getting alot of favoritism. 9 schools out of 14 in. I mean agree with it but its alot. One can argue about spreading the wealth but with the ACC and Pac 12 being garbage this year. The Big 10 benefits from that.
Non conference wins matter alot...especially high end wins. Alabama just 19-13 and 9-9 in SEC play had a slew of high end wins. Notre Dame's win over Kentucky was a game changer. Non conference activity is a big factor in determining how your NET is going to end up and how your conference is going to do in the NET. That really helped the SEC and Mountain West out and you see it represented in their strong numbers. And while the NET isnt all that important its going to be important if you are a power 6 school and you have both a great net and great wins. In Iowas case they had a great net without the great wins. PS yes RU got but yes they need to schedule stronger OOC
15 losses is a bridge too far. See Oklahoma. Only one school ever with that many losses. You have to be extraordinary to get in. Oklahoma wasnt...they were just 4-12 vs the field. Perhaps if they beat Texas Tech and made the Big 12 final, 19-15 would be a new test for the committee but that did not happen. Michigan at 17-14 was just 3 above 500 which means they became the 5th school to make it in a non covid year less than 4 games above 500. If they were 17-15 they were not getting in. Record matters but its a tightrope walk. Michgan was also 7-12 vs the field. Better stuff than Oklahoma. You do see that schools with bulky loss totals like Michigan and RU will be put into the field if they have a significant amount of quality wins...
A big blow to metrics guys like Norlander, Parrish, Warriner, and the younger bracketologists. Efficiency and Predictive ratings are not how the field is selected. Many suspected this and it was confirmed. Old school wins out. The Kenpom, bpi, blah blah blah appear on the team sheet as numbers, nothing more. The committee is given no instruction to even consider them. If number looks out of whack or numbers in RU's case, the committee is going to see they are outliers given the meat of the resume. Personally when I evaluate, I do not even look at any of the 5-6 numbers like sor, bpi, kenpom, totally ignore them. The NET I do pay attention to but not until I have made my full evaluation. The committee knows full well stuff like Houston at 3, San Fran at 22, Va Tech at 27 , Rutgers at 77 does not fool anyone. What your resume says rather than the number matters more. I never want to see KenPom on the this board or his partner Bart Torvik...they are literally meaningless especially stuff like wins above the bubble..what does that even mean...someone please explain. its literally useless and so is Bart.
Bracketology should not begin in December and heat up in January. Bracketology should start in February and heat up by the end of the month. Alot of worthless brackets in January. Xavier was a projected 4 seed in January. Wake Forest was being talked about as a lock for 6 weeks. Both schools were talked about as locks even 2 weeks. Wyoming was a lock for weeks. Things can change in a hurry once the resumes are actually looked at rather than looking at a number or efficiency ratings. It was funny to watch how these schools dropped day after day and the big adjustments made.
Bracketologists have big egos including me. No one wants to be wrong. We all are. I need to do a better job on seeding, some of that is I have to get more in tune with how the committee sees things and not how I see things. Much to clean up there. Bracketologists are always learning.
Joe Lunardi is such a polarizing figure but I like him. He was the first. He is generally good at what he does. He knows his stuff. He is more consistent than most and he is old school. Jerry Palm is the worst guy that CBS can have. He is awkward not photogenic. In some ways I do like having a geek up there and it seems to be embracing his role as the Village Idiot but CBS is covering the NCAA tourney they should have a guy that give it to you straight. His bracketing the final week was awful. He was putting BYU in the field, like the only one on the matrix to do so. He was keeping Michigan, Indiana and RU out and then suddenly putting the former 2 in even though no one played. Yes we all scrub the field, but Jerry knew better, he knew what he was doing and he knew he was going to move at least one if not two Big 10 schools in. Historical data matters until it does not. Jerry knows this and will go with the odds over rational discussion about Rutgers.
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