Today’s Bauertology post perhaps goes beyond the realm of typical analysis and goes a bit more into public service announcement territory, since I think it’s worth addressing some of the recent developments in bracketology circles over the past week.
There’s been some pretty nasty discourse lately between bracketologists and fans of teams not happy with where their team is being projected. And I’m here to tell it to you straight: It does not matter that much. It is absolutely not worth the name-calling, flaming, and baiting I’ve seen over the last couple days.
For one thing, I will never understand anyone who thinks that a bracketologist is out to get them or their team personally by giving them an unfavorable seed or excluding them altogether. Every bracketologist’s goal is to be as accurate to the selection committee’s vision for selecting and seeding the 68 teams as possible. I have never made any considerations for personal opinions regarding how much I like or dislike a team when I build my brackets, and I have faith that my fellow bracketology counterparts are abiding by the same idea.
If you’re not happy with where your team is projected to place, take it up with the selection committee. It’s their analysis, line of thinking, and choices that we bracketologists are just trying to emulate, as we use our knowledge to infer the things that they value from previous bracket reveals, in addition to taking in known information, such as this, directly from the committee’s most updated bracketing principles guidebook:
Among the resources available to the committee are an extensive season-long evaluation of teams through watching games, conference monitoring calls and NABC regional advisory rankings; complete box scores and results, head-to-head results, results versus common opponents, imbalanced conference schedules and results, overall and non-conference strength of schedule, the quality of wins and losses, road record, player and coach availability and various computer metrics.
NCAA Tournament Selection Committee
Every season is going to be different, and the things most valued by the selection committee may change depending on which portion of the bracket you’re talking about. But through years of experience, we bracketologists tend to have a pretty good idea of what we’re looking for when teams are putting together tournament cases. That’s all we’re trying to do.
Much of the ire this week in particular has stemmed from a debate between the Mountain West and ACC. And frankly, I don’t see any need for these leagues to be fighting. Both have some awesome basketball teams. Both have some crappy basketball teams. Both leagues are a heck of a lot of fun to watch.
From my vantage point, most of the disdain seems to be coming from ACC fans, who don’t like the idea that their conference is currently in a comparable spot to the Mountain West, given the ACC’s storied history of national titles and, at one time, being arguably the premier league in Division I. I totally understand that, I really do. But bracketology is focused on the now, not what you’ve done in the past. And the reality is that the ACC is not the same powerhouse league it was years ago. It hasn’t been a top-3 conference since 2019, a consequence of 1) teams at the bottom of the league like Louisville, Notre Dame, and Georgia Tech being horrendously bad in recent memory, routinely losing games to the like of DePaul, Bellarmine, The Citadel, and Miami (OH) over the past few years, 2) other ACC teams not being able to build high-quality résumés via conference play because of the underwhelming results near the bottom and middle-bottom of this league, and 3) failing to recognize that the ACC’s overall strength is not what is once was, thus hurting yourself by not scheduling a more difficult non-conference slate to prove that you’re a cut above. There is no “Power 6” indicator on the selection committee’s team sheet. That designation alone does not give you preferential treatment. You can’t always rely on the ability to coast on your conference’s reputation. You need to go out and prove it every single year.
Another focus on how “the now” is the critical factor is when people bring to reason the argument about Mountain West teams underperforming in the NCAA Tournament in comparison to ACC teams. I totally understand that frustration given the ACC’s history in March and the MWC’s struggles. But as I tweeted yesterday, a full 30-game season in which we really get to know a team is a much better indicator of a team’s quality than results in a single-elimination tournament. So many wacky things can happen when your sample size is one. Does Purdue losing in the first round to FDU mean that Purdue is the worse team? Of course not. So why should I take the results of one game over the results of 30? Also remember: Every team and case is different from season to season. Just because Utah State went one-and-done in the tournament last year doesn’t mean that they’ll do the same this year.
Finally to this point, and perhaps most importantly, the selection committee itself has never made any kind of accommodation in its seeding when it comes to success and failure in prior tournaments. And until they do (and I don’t think they ever will), it can’t be something that bracketologists factor in their projections.
Going back to my ACC/MWC comparison, the two conferences are far more similar this season than one would think. Both have teams in the top half of the league vying for strong seeding (North Carolina/Duke, San Diego State/Utah State, etc.). Both some have really abhorrent teams at the bottom dragging down the league’s power (Louisville/Notre Dame, San Jose State/Air Force, etc.). Both teams are projected to land between four and six bids in the upcoming tournament. There’s more similarity than there is difference, honestly. What doesn’t help matters is when the national media continues to antagonize this rift, seemingly feeling the need to praise the Mountain West’s perceived strength and criticize the ACC’s perceived weakness. But again, that’s only because it’s juicy to compare these leagues in current year with the ACC’s storied past and the Mountain West’s lack of such. Fortunately, the selection committee doesn’t care about that. These two leagues are performing about equal this year, no matter how much push and pull the narratives try to enforce, and that’s how the selection committee will see it.
With that idea in mind, it all comes back down to the résumés: the thing that the selection committee is looking at. To pick on Steve Forbes and Wake Forest here for a minute (just since they’ve often been the center of this heated discussion)—with all due respect, I don’t know who in their right mind told Steve that “the NET and KenPom are the two most important factors for selection,” because any bracketologist who’s paid attention to the last five years of tournaments can tell you that that’s not true. They’re important factors, for sure, but they’re not the most important—not the things you want to be solely building your tournament case on. Or else 2023 Florida Atlantic, NET rank #13, would have gotten much better than a 9 seed. Or 2023 Utah State, KenPom and NET #18, would have gotten much better than a 10 seed. Or what about 2022 10-seed San Francisco, 21st in KenPom and 22nd in NET?
NET and KenPom may express a sort of inherent quality of your team, but the selection committee is less interested with what computing numbers say and more interested with what you’ve actually gone and done out on the court, especially when it comes to those final few at-large spots.
Pitt vs. Rutgers is a great example from last season. Rutgers ranked 40th in NET and 35th in KenPom, while Pitt was all the way down at 67th and 77th, respectively. So why did Pitt get chosen and Rutgers get left out? Because Pitt was 4-4 in Quad 1 with three of those wins coming on the road, while Rutgers lost four Quad 3 games against one of the worst non-conference schedules in the country.
It’s things like that that help us in 2024—Why is Wake Forest out today when they’re 20th in KenPom and 27th in NET, while Nevada is in the field, ranking 42nd in both of those numbers? Because the Wolf Pack have capitalized on their opportunities, going 5-4 in Quad 1 with Q1 road wins over Utah State and Washington, tallying four total wins over other at-large teams (Utah State, San Diego State, Colorado State, and even a non-con game against TCU for good measure), while Wake Forest has struggled in the same scenarios, going 1-5 against Quad 1 and 2-7 on the road, their best victory outside of Winston-Salem coming to a team not close to the tournament (Boston College), grabbing only two victories over fellow at-large teams (Florida, Virginia) along the way.
There’s no narratives to push here. It’s all facts. That’s the refreshing thing about bracketology. It completely does away with narratives and just focuses on what the facts are and how to interpret them.
I promise that no one is out to get you or your team. We’re just here to do our job based on what we know the selection committee values, and if you don’t like it, then so be it.
And at the end of the day, a bracketologist’s projection of where your team sits is nothing to get this worked up about. We’re all friends here. We all want our teams to do well, and we’re unhappy when they don’t. We all love the same golden game that is college basketball; our lives would be considerably worse without it. We are all one and the same in that mindset.
So let’s all be a little kinder to each other, eh?
OK, soapbox rant over. Enjoy the Bauertology for Friday, Feb. 23.
BAUERTOLOGY 