It is this time of the year when pretty much everyone in college basketball is complaining. There are complaints for the importance of NCSOS, NET, or any other metric the committee uses to justify its decision for the teams to make the tournament. Even those that make it complain for their seeding. Everyone complaints. It is the human thing to do so when you have people making decisions. Even though there is this belief out there that the only thing that matters for the committee today is analytics and metrics, this is far from true. At the end of the day humans make the decisions and they will use the numbers in any subjective way they see fit. Otherwise Virginia would not have made the tournament this year over say Pitt or any of the 3 Big East teams snubbed (St John’s, Providence and Seton Hall). The way the committee operates makes it hard to be consistent from year to year even if supposedly the same things are looked at. To make the whole selection process more transparent and consistent I think that the NCAA needs to draw parallels and design a process similar to how UEFA decides which teams from each country will compete for its international competitions (e.g., Champions League).
At a high level, every country has a pre-determined number of teams that qualify for the Champions League based on their final position on their national league table. Now of course, not all national leagues are equal; it is tougher to finish 3rd in Premiera Division than win the Greek league. How does UEFA decide how many teams from each country will participate? They have a ranking system that is based on the results of teams from each country across its international competitions over the last 5 years. In many cases not all of the teams qualify for the group stage of Champions league but rather they have to go through qualification rounds taking place in the summer before the group stage starts in September. What do all these have to do with college basketball and the NCAA tournament?
Well the setting is similar. Instead of countries you have conferences and at the end of the day you want to have teams participate in a bigger tournament (Champions league and NCAA tournament) for the ultimate winner. However, the conferences are of varying strength, just as the different soccer national leagues are of varying strength as well. So the NCAA can take a similar approach and the first step for this is to take control of the non-conference schedule. NCAA should create a schema that will allow them to obtain a conference ranking similar to the UEFA ranking system (one possible way for such a ranking was described in this blog before). This can be based on random draws among teams of different conferences, with possible a yearly rotation among conferences similar to how the NFL does its non-division scheduling. At the end of the non-conference schedule each conference will know how many teams will send to the 64 team tournament directly, and how many teams will participate in the qualifiers.
Qualifiers? Well this will replace the conference tournaments. Conferences will only have regular seasons, and while I understand the appeal of having conference tournaments with surprising runs etc., the same is true for these qualifier tournaments. The schedule could have several rounds and specific teams get buys based on their conference and their seed within the conference (even in Champions League there are teams/countries that have to go through 4 rounds and others that have to go through 1 round to reach the group stage).
All of this will basically keep the same number of teams in the tournament, will not take away the excitement of single elimination tournament and Cinderella stories, but it will make things (in my opinion) more transparent and consistent. I am sure no one will complain …
The Athlytics Blog 